Chapter 35
Christmas Day dawned bright and sunny. The city was blanketed in six inches of fresh snow. The downtown streets were quiet and empty, for the most part, as families gathered together to celebrate within the confines of their homes. Most of my customers would be doing the same, including the bulk of the Capone Club, though I suspected most of them would find their way to the bar later in the day, once I opened. We had more than just the holiday to celebrate.
I awoke a little after nine, relishing the fact that I didn’t have to get up right away. I rolled over in bed, smiled at the sleeping man beside me, and curled up to spoon his back. I stayed that way for a while, flitting in and out of sleep, trying to embrace the moment.
I knew the peace and serenity couldn’t last. My sword of Damocles was still hanging over my head.
Eventually, I sensed something different in Duncan and knew he was awake. “Coffee?” I whispered.
“Of course, but let me make it.” He rolled over, kissed me on my nose, and got out of bed. He pulled on his boxers and jeans, said, “Merry Christmas!” and then shuffled out to the kitchen.
I stayed in bed, lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling. My mind was whirring a hundred miles an hour, flipping back and forth between the events of the past few days and the last letter writer clue, which we had yet to figure out. When Duncan returned to the bedroom with two steaming mugs of coffee on a tray and some coffee cake I’d made the day before, I sat up and leaned my back against the headboard.
He joined me in the bed, and the two of us sat there sipping and eating for several minutes, not a word spoken between us. It was a comfortable silence, despite the discomfort I felt inside. We had yet to talk about what had happened with Aidan, though I’d gone over it several times with other cops. I decided now was the time.
“Thanks again for your excellent timing the other night,” I said to him after we’d finished eating our cake. “I honestly thought I was done for.”
“You very nearly were,” he said. “I knocked on the back door three times, and when I got no answer, I knew something was off. I went around to the front of the bar and looked through the window. I saw Aidan standing there, holding a gun on you as you were getting onto the stool. I called right then for backup.” He paused and gave me a sheepish smile. “I was trying to figure out how I was going to get inside when it occurred to me to check and see if the door was locked. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I pushed down on the thumb latch and felt it click.”
“I shut it after I let Clay and Aidan in, but I was so distracted by what Clay was telling me that I forgot to lock it.”
“Good thing. I wasn’t sure what was going on, just that Aidan Gallagher was aiming a gun at you. I didn’t know if Clay was with him and in on it or a victim like you. When I saw Clay start to come from behind the bar, I was about to burst through the door, thinking he was going after you. Then Aidan shot him, and I switched my focus.”
“I never saw you come into the bar, because Aidan was blocking my view.” I took in a deep breath, trying to settle myself, as the memory of that night jangled my nerves. “Hitting him in the shoulder the way you did was smart. It disabled his gun arm. But when the blood splatter from his shoulder hit me in the face, I thought it was my own blood. I thought he’d shot me and I was dead.” I looked at him and shuddered. “In another few seconds I would have been if you hadn’t shot him when you did. Thank goodness your aim is good.”
Duncan draped an arm over my shoulders and pulled me to him, hugging me tight. It felt safe, warm, reassuring. He held me like that for several seconds and then said, “I was aiming for his head.”
It took a moment for the words to register, and when they did, I started to laugh. I pushed away from him and looked him straight in the eye, still sniggering. “You’re making that up,” I said.
“Sorry, lass, but I’m not.”
“Oh, my.” My laughter crescendoed until it bordered on something close to hysterical as the realization of how close I’d come to death washed over me like ice-cold water.
“Mack,” Duncan said, taking my hand and squeezing it. “You’re okay. It’s over.” He leaned in close to my face and looked me straight in the eye. “Take a deep breath.”
I did, then exhaled it with another shudder. Finally sobering, I said, “Well, whatever you were aiming at, you saved my life. Thank you.”
He leaned back against the headboard and eyed me with a serious expression. “I’m so sorry for all the darkness I’ve brought into your life, Mack. I can’t help but feel that none of this would have happened to you if it wasn’t for me. Promise me you won’t let any of this erase the goodness and happiness inside you.”
I cocked my head to the side and gave him a feeble smile. “I promise I’ll try,” I said, “but I’m getting very pissed off about this letter writer. And scared. Cora hasn’t found anything on Twitter, and I have no idea what the beer means. We have only today and tomorrow to figure it out. What if we don’t?”
I expected him to feed me some platitude about not worrying or a reassurance that we’d get there, but instead he sighed, ran a hand through his hair, and said, “I don’t know.”
On that somber note, I pushed my worries down deep and locked them away for later. Today I wanted to escape from all the death and cruelty and darkness in the world, if only for a little while.
A short time later we got up and went downstairs to make ready for the group of “family” that would be joining us for the afternoon. I was planning a holiday meal with all the trimmings: roast turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, an assortment of veggies, and a variety of pies for dessert. While I busied myself getting the turkey in the oven and peeling potatoes, Duncan worked alongside me, whipping up a traditional Scottish Christmas pudding, a fruit-filled concoction with rum sauce as the topping. He also made up a batch of his grandmother’s hot buttered rum, a hot, sweet, creamy drink that seemed perfect on a cold winter’s day.
I had told our guests they should plan on eating around two, but that they were welcome to come earlier if they liked, any time after eleven. Joe and Frank Signoriello arrived first, coming at their traditional time of a few minutes past eleven. They settled in at a table, and I served them each a bottled beer at their request. For this occasion, all drinks were on the house.
Mal arrived a few minutes after that, and Cora showed up twenty minutes later with Tiny in tow. She assured me that Tiny understood the need to keep Duncan’s presence a secret, and despite the fact that Tiny’s loose lips were a big reason all the press headaches had descended upon me in the first place, I felt he could be trusted at this point. His original slip had been made out of ignorance, and at this point he was so grateful to us for solving the murder of his sister, I knew he would never do anything to hurt me or the group.
Since Tiny hadn’t been around much lately, much of our conversation revolved around what the Capone Club had been up to and the evolution of the Middleton case. Everyone had brought small gifts, which we would exchange at some point, but the biggest gift any of us would give this season was the one we got for Ben Middleton. He was still in prison—the wheels of justice turn painfully slow, particularly when the players are forced to backpedal—but his innocence was now obvious.
Not only had Melanie Smithson stayed on the line during my phone conversation with her the other night, but she’d also recorded the entire thing. She’d brought a small handheld recorder with her when she’d gone on the run, and any phone calls she got from an unknown number were put on speaker and recorded. Her motivation for this was her fear of the Gallaghers and what they might do to try to find her and silence her. She had decided to record her phone call to me, as well, and when she heard Aidan Gallagher’s voice in the background, she’d had the wits to keep the line open and the recorder running.
Duncan told us that once Melanie knew the Gallagher family secret had been exposed, she had expressed a willingness to return home and testify against Aidan. Her testimony and the recording of what had happened in my bar the other night would likely be more than enough to put Aidan away. But we had plenty more. It had turned out that Aidan’s blood type was the same as Rory’s.
Once the truth about Aidan and Tiffany was known, secrets started spilling out of the Gallagher family like blood from a deep wound. And it turned out the Gallaghers had a lot of wounds, some of them festering. Several stunning revelations had come to light over the past day and a half, not the least of which was the real reason behind Colin Gallagher’s dislike of his son Rory. Not only was Aidan the golden child in Colin’s eyes—the firstborn, as well as the more handsome, successful, and charismatic son—but he was also the only son Colin actually had. Kelly revealed that she’d had an affair years ago, during which she found out she was pregnant. She’d had no way of knowing if the child was Colin’s or her lover’s, so she had hidden the truth from Colin and broken off the affair, intending to pass the child off as Colin’s no matter what. Since both of the boys favored their mother, and Rory bore enough of a resemblance to Aidan to quell any suspicions Colin might have had, the patriarch had been none the wiser, though in retrospect I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d sensed all along that something was off.
And speaking of off, Colin had eventually figured out that his eldest son had some sexual proclivities that were outside the norm. He caught Aidan and Tiffany together during the family gathering Ben had mentioned, the one that had gotten Tiffany so upset. When Colin later confronted Tiffany, she admitted to her father that Aidan had been sexually assaulting her for years and that he was the one who had gotten her pregnant the summer before her senior year in high school. By this time, Colin was grooming Aidan to take over the family business, and he’d already bought the silence of two girls Aidan had raped while he was in college, one of whom had ended up pregnant and subsequently had an abortion. So Colin hauled Aidan off to a counselor in New York City, hiding the sessions under the guise of business trips. The counseling didn’t work, and during one of these “business trips,” Colin forced his son to have a vasectomy, before his activities resulted in a passel of kids with a future claim on the family fortunes. It wasn’t Rory who had had some secret procedure done, as Aidan had said. It was Aidan himself.
Aidan’s fixation on his sister never subsided. If anything, it grew stronger. The dog bite incident happened during one of Aidan’s attacks on Tiffany while the two of them were home alone. Tiffany had tried to fend Aidan off that time, and during the struggle Rory came home unexpectedly. He heard the sounds of a struggle coming from his sister’s bedroom and opened the door to her room. When he saw Aidan slap Tiffany, he ran into the room, grabbed his brother’s arm, and yanked him back. The two boys started grappling, and Tiffany got knocked down at one point when Aidan shoved Rory and he fell into her. The dog had entered the room by then, and when Tiffany went down, the dog rose to her defense, biting Rory in the process. It was enough to stop the fight, but the dog ended up paying the ultimate price for his devotion to his mistress.
Rory never knew what the fight between Tiffany and Aidan had been about, but he began to suspect that his brother wasn’t right. That suspicion grew stronger when Ben came into the picture. Rory could tell Aidan hated the guy, though he couldn’t figure out why. And when Tiffany became engaged to Ben, Aidan’s fixation on the two of them intensified. He was constantly tailing his sister, wanting to know where she was and what she was doing. He tried several times to drive a wedge between the couple by telling lies about Ben to both Tiffany and his father, prompting Colin to hire the PI. When those efforts failed to break the couple up, Aidan grew desperate.
It was Aidan who had bought the gun from Harrington, but when it came time to actually kill Ben, he hired someone else to do the job. He knew Tiffany and Ben were heading for the house in Door County and where the house was located, because the couple had shared the information with Kelly, who had written it down and left it hanging on the fridge. Aidan hired an old down-on-his-luck college buddy named Jack Cartwright to rent a house two miles away and buy both a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a snowmobile. Aidan paid for the items, though he told Cartwright he would be allowed to keep them as part of his payment. Aidan and Cartwright then went to the rented house the day after Ben and Tiffany left, and Aidan spied on the couple numerous times during their stay, walking to their rental house before the heavy snowfalls came, then using the snowmobile.
On the day of Tiffany’s death, Aidan watched as Ben headed into town for supplies. Then he paid a visit to Tiffany, forcing himself on her yet again and threatening to kill Ben if she ever told anyone. After leaving the house, he hung around outside long enough to see Ben return. He listened outside a window, heard Tiffany insist that they head home before the storm, and then saw Ben start packing up the car. At that point he hurried back to Cartwright and put his murder plan into action. The two men snowmobiled to a point several miles down from the house where Ben and Tiffany were staying, and got ready. Aidan stayed off in the woods with the snowmobile, while Cartwright went out to the road to wait for Ben and Tiffany’s car.
Aidan was so angry that Tiffany had been killed and Ben hadn’t that he killed Cartwright. Though Duncan said Aidan denied it, there was a commonly held belief that killing Cartwright had been part of Aidan’s plan all along. Cartwright’s body had not been found, and if what Aidan had told the cops was true, it never would be. Aidan said he had disposed of it in the wood chipper that came with the house they were staying in.
Aidan was arrested, and once he was released from the hospital after the treatment of his shoulder wound, he was taken down to the station and questioned. In a blazing display of his psychotic thought processes and his unmitigated arrogance, he confessed to everything. He declared himself a free entity, a member of his own ruling government, and as such, he insisted that he was not subject to the laws of the state or the country. He claimed that it didn’t matter what he told the cops, because he was one of the wealthy elite and was therefore untouchable. He told them they could lock him up for now if they wanted, but eventually, he would buy his freedom and make all of them pay.
Listening to Duncan tell us about Aidan’s behavior was surreal. The man had hidden his psychosis well, but once it came out, it came out with a vengeance. It was a grim, sad, and yet oddly satisfying tale that proved money wasn’t the secret to happiness. I could only imagine what things would be like inside that magnificent house on the lake in the days to come. No doubt this Christmas would be one that none of the Gallaghers would forget for a long time to come, if ever.
“What’s going to happen to Aidan?” Cora asked once we had finished bringing Tiny up to date on the story.
Duncan’s lips compressed into a thin line. “He’s being held pending a psych evaluation. Based on what I observed, I’d say the odds are good he’ll be declared insane and locked up in a mental institution somewhere.”
“And how is Clay doing?” Joe asked.
“He’s doing well,” I told them. “He came through his surgery fine. He’ll be eating through a straw for a few days and out of commission for a week or two, but he’ll recover. And the nurses told me he’s already sitting up in his bed, typing out an article about the case.”
“I hope it’s not going to lambaste you again,” Frank said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Cora visited him yesterday, and they had a little chat.”
Everyone looked over at Cora, curious.
“It’s true,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “I think Clay Sanders has seen the wisdom of having Mack on his side. I’m not sure the police department or the DA’s office will fare so well, however.”
“I’m working on that,” Duncan said cryptically.
With that, I got up to fetch the brothers another round of beers, and Tiny excused himself to go to the men’s room.
“I have some other news,” Cora said when I returned with the brothers’ beers. “It’s about the letter writer, and it’s important, but before I tell you, I’d like to ask that we let Tiny in on what’s going on. He already knows Duncan is still coming by, and I feel confident he’ll keep mum about anything that we tell him has to stay secret. And besides, he’s pretty busy with work right now and won’t be around much for a while.”
I frowned, uncertain about bringing anyone else in on the case, and gave a questioning look to the others.
Joe and Frank both shrugged.
Mal pursed his lips in thought for a second and then said, “I think we can trust him.”
I turned to Duncan, my eyebrows raised expectantly.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I’m not keen on bringing anyone else into it, but I imagine it has to be hard for Cora to keep a secret like that from someone she’s close to. And I agree with Mal. I think Tiny is trustworthy. So I’ll leave it up to you, Mack.”
I looked over at Cora. “You’re sure he won’t let something slip at some point?”
“Positive,” Cora said without hesitation. “Tiny might come across as a big, dumb oaf at times, but he’s actually quite intelligent.” She sighed and flashed me an apologetic smile. “And to be honest, he’s already figured out that I’m working on something for you, something that’s very hush-hush. He’s asked me twice already, and I’ve been stalling him, but I think it’s only a matter of time before he figures out some or all of it on his own.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Let’s bring him in on it.”
As if on cue, we heard the squeak of the men’s room door opening and Tiny’s heavy, clumping footsteps as he headed back to the table.
“Tiny,” I said once he had resumed his seat. “There’s something we need to tell you.”
Over the next ten minutes or so, we brought Tiny up to speed on the letter writer case, including our suspicion that Suzanne Collier might be behind it and why.
“Cora ordered a bottle of Opium perfume for me, and it came yesterday,” I told him and the brothers, since they didn’t know this part yet, either. “The smell of that perfume is definitely the same smell I picked up on in Gary’s car. That doesn’t prove it was Suzanne who was in there, because I’m sure there are hundreds, maybe thousands of other women in the Milwaukee area who wear that perfume, but it certainly points another finger in her direction.”
“And I’ve uncovered several more fingers that point that way,” Cora said. “Quite damningly, in fact.” She leaned over and reached into the laptop bag she had brought with her, though in an amazing display of holiday spirit and ardent restraint, she hadn’t taken the machine out since her arrival. She still didn’t take it out. What she removed instead was a notebook. She opened it and then went on, glancing at the items she had written down. “To start with, the Collier family has established a fund that awards several scholarships a year to students at the U of W. Suzanne Collier is the family representative on the board that reviews the applicants’ files and makes the final decision on who gets the money. And it just so happens that both the girl who worked at the zoo and the young man who worked at the Miller plant were recipients.”
“Of course,” Mal said with a snap of his fingers. “Those scholarship applications would have given her access to their financial information, their names and addresses, their areas of study, their employment . . . all of it. It would have been easy for her to deliver the packages to both of them.”
“And that’s not all,” Cora said. “Remember the art store you went to for the very first clue?”
I nodded.
“The guy who owns it was about to go bankrupt two years ago, but he was able to secure a loan to keep the store afloat. Guess who gave him that loan,” Cora went on.
“Suzanne Collier?” Joe said, unnecessarily. We’d all made the appropriate leap in logic.
Cora nodded and then looked at me apologetically. “Do you remember the name of that store?”
I thought back, and then my eyes widened in amazement. “Oh, my goodness,” I said, slapping myself on the side of my head. “It was Collier Art Supply!”
Cora nodded. “I don’t know how we all managed to miss that connection. But when I was going back over some notes I had on the case, it suddenly leaped out at me. So I did some digging. It turns out the owner is a distant cousin of some sort to the Collier family.”
Everyone at the table exchanged sheepish looks of disbelief, all of us stymied by the fact that we hadn’t made the connection sooner.
“If Suzanne owns that store,” I said, “she’d have unlimited access to the ink that was used in those letters.”
“Not only that,” Cora said, looking a bit smug. “I had a chat yesterday with one of my clients, a very wealthy lady here in the city who hangs out in many of the same circles that Suzanne does. I had to talk to her about something related to some computer security work my company is doing for her with regard to the printing businesses her family owns, and given what I’d already uncovered about Suzanne, I purposely steered the conversation around to the topic of modern-day printing doing away with certain endearing but old-fashioned skills, like calligraphy. She insisted that the old way of doing things would always linger on. I disagreed and asked her if she knew even one person who does hand calligraphy anymore. I’m sure you can guess whose name she mentioned.”
“Suzanne’s,” the brothers said in unison.
“And there’s more still,” Cora said, licking her lips and looking like the cat that had just eaten the canary. “That spice shop at the Public Market? They have several business arrangements with entities in the city, including the one with the university that we know about. That connection, which I’m not sure Suzanne knew about, may well have been a lucky coincidence because it put us on the right track. But the one I’m betting she does know about is the contract the shop has with an upscale restaurant in town called Toby’s.”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never eaten there,” I said.
“Neither have I,” Cora said. “It’s a bit pricey for my tastes. But the interesting thing about it is who owns it—the Collier family. Toby Collier is Suzanne’s grandfather. Want to guess who does the books for the place?”
“Tad?” I said, feeling my heart sink.
Cora nodded.
“Oh, God,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed for a moment as the ramifications of this sank in. “Do you think Tad is in on it?”
Cora cocked her head and made a tentative face. “I don’t know, but my gut tells me no. My gut isn’t proof, however.”
“He wouldn’t necessarily have to be a part of it,” Frank said. I suspected that he, like me, didn’t want to believe that Tad had been fooling all of us all this time. “If Tad does the books for the restaurant, Suzanne might have access to the spice store’s account info. That’s all she would have needed. Right?” Frank looked at the rest of us with a hopeful expression. There were some tentative nods in the group, but I knew that for now, everyone would be very wary of Tad.
“Is that everything?” Duncan asked, looking solemn.
Cora shook her head. “No. I have one more connection. The Collier family owns a series of plots at Forest Home Cemetery. Several of Suzanne’s ancestors are buried there. And those plots are on the hill very near to the Prairie Rest area where Mack found that clue in the willow tree. Plus, we’ve already established Suzanne’s possible connection to the aster and the willow leaf that came in the letter that led Mack there.”
“What about the casino?” Mal asked. “Any connections there?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find,” Cora said, shaking her head. “But it’s a public enough place that I’m not sure there needs to be one.”
There was a period of silence as we all sat, digesting the huge course of information Cora had just fed us.
It was Duncan who finally broke the silence. “If we’re on the right track and Suzanne Collier is the one behind all of this, it’s not going to be easy to prove. What you’ve told us is very damning, but none of it is evidence that would hold up in court. And given Suzanne Collier’s reputation, and the money and power resources she has at her fingertips, it won’t be easy to convince anyone that she’s behind it. In fact, I find it hard to believe that the woman is twisted enough to actually kill people over this.”
“Well, there is one more thing,” Cora said a bit cryptically. She reached into her laptop bag again and pulled out a sheet of paper, which she laid in the center of the table. We all leaned forward to look at it.
“This is a printout of an article from last year from one of those paparazzi-driven gab rags that like to stalk the rich and the famous. It says that Suzanne Collier was observed on three different occasions exiting the office of a shrink who caters to high-society types. It’s not much, but it might suggest that Suzanne has some issues we don’t know about.”
Cora was right that it wasn’t much, and the entity that had printed the article was well known for circling the truth with their use of innuendo and suggestion.
After giving us all a few moments to read the brief article, which came with a fuzzy picture that might or might not have been of Suzanne Collier, Cora then threw a wrench into the works.
“I hate to burst this nice bubble I’ve created for all of you,” she said with a guarded, cautious tone, “but despite all these connections to Suzanne, there is a big problem.”
Everyone averted their gaze from the article on the table to Cora.
On cue, Cora reached into her laptop bag yet again and withdrew another piece of paper. She set it atop the first article, and everyone’s attention shifted to it. This one was a printout of a news article from the Journal, and in a large, very clear picture at the top was Suzanne Collier.
“This is from last week,” Cora explained. “It’s a story about how Suzanne visited some orphanage in Mexico and donated a bunch of money to help feed and clothe the kids there. Look at the date in the article.”
I scanned the text to find what she was referring to. At first, I didn’t understand the point she was trying to make, but then I made the connection.
So did Duncan. “She was there when Lewis Carmichael was killed,” he said.
Cora nodded grimly.
“So that means she couldn’t have killed him,” I said, leaning back in my seat and sighing with frustration. I felt my hopes go up in smoke like a magician’s flash paper.
“To be honest, I was thinking she couldn’t have done it, anyway,” Duncan said. I and the others gave him an inquisitive look. “Lewis was stabbed to death,” he explained. “But he was also beaten pretty badly. It would be very difficult for a woman, especially one Suzanne’s size, to do that. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly unlikely. And given this”—he tapped the article on the table—“I’d say it’s safe to assume she didn’t do it.”
The disappointment everyone felt over this revelation was palpable. And then Mal made it worse.
“But I imagine Tad could have done it.”
The pain of that suggestion was like a knife in my back. Judging from the horrified expressions on the faces of everyone else at the table, I wasn’t alone.
But then Cora took on the role of the cavalry. “Tad couldn’t have done it, either,” she said. “He was here with us, upstairs in the Capone Club room, at the time Lewis was killed.”
“That’s right!” Joe said, slapping his knee and sounding excited.
There was a collective sigh of relief around the table, and I could sense a lifting of the oppressive melancholy that hung over the group.
“Okay,” Duncan said. “So Tad is in the clear, at least in Lewis’s death, but we still have the other issues at hand. And I think Mal may have been on the right track. Suzanne Collier may well be our suspect. In fact, given all the stuff that Cora has dug up, I’m inclined to think she is. But she didn’t do it alone. I think she had an accomplice.”
This made perfect sense to me. “Of course,” I said. “With her money, it would be easy to hire someone to do her dirty work, or at least some of it.”
Frank leaned forward, his eyes big. “That would be the smart way to do it,” he said. “Either hire someone or find someone with a motive that meshes with hers. If they split the nastiness between them but connect all the murders with the letters, it gives both parties alibis for at least some of the murders. Kind of like that movie Strangers on a Train.”
Mal shot Duncan a look. Based on the expression on their faces, I knew they were both thinking the same thing, and whatever it was, it didn’t bode well.
“What?” I said, staring down the two of them. “What are you two thinking?”
Neither of them answered at first, but after Mal stared Duncan down for several seconds, I saw Duncan’s shoulders sag. He gave Mal an almost imperceptible nod.
Mal looked at me, his expression grim. “Duncan and I have discussed these letters and the lack of any usable evidence to go with them. I think we have to consider the possibility that whoever is involved has some solid knowledge of forensics and police procedures. Would Suzanne Collier have that kind of knowledge?”
Looks were exchanged, and after a few seconds of silence, Cora said, “I don’t know.”
My thoughts immediately leapt to Duncan’s partner, Jimmy, but that was water I had to tread carefully.
“Anyone who participates in the Capone Club will have that kind of knowledge,” Mal noted. There were several solemn nods around the table.
“There’s one thing we’re forgetting,” I said. “I can buy a certain amount of coincidence, but there seems to be enough connections to Suzanne Collier for me to believe she’s involved in some way. If we assume her motive is to disband the Capone Club so Tad doesn’t spend so much time here—a motive that sounds a bit flimsy to me, but we can talk more about that later—then why target Duncan in the letters? Why allow the Capone Club to continue to go on and target me and Duncan?”
“Well, the two of you are the heart of the Capone Club,” Cora said. “Eliminate the two of you from the mix and the club will likely disband, particularly if several members end up dead.”
My mind was reeling with the possibilities, and I felt a stab of anger—literally, as it manifested itself as a sharp pain in my side—that our holiday had been tainted with these morbid thoughts.
“Enough,” I said, determined to shift the mood to a lighter topic. “Let’s table the discussion for now and come back to it at a later date. I want to focus on the holiday. Who wants to give me a hand in the kitchen?”
An hour later we were all sitting around our pushed-together tables, stuffed, sated, and content.
“Anyone want coffee?” I asked.
There were some sleepy-eyed nods from the group, so I got up and went behind the bar to start a pot brewing. Once I got it going, I stood a moment and watched the others laughing, talking, and enjoying themselves, and it made me smile. It was an odd, misfit group of friends I had, this substitute family of mine, and given that I’d always felt like a bit of a misfit myself, I found it apropos. Watching them, I prayed that no harm would come to any of them in this cruel game I was forced to play with the letter writer.
I felt fiercely protective of all of them suddenly, and this imbued me with a new sense of determination. Somehow I had to beat this letter writer. I was going to win this game, no matter what it took. I imagined myself in a horse race, riding a white stallion who was surging ahead from the back of the pack. I saw myself overtake a ghostly image riding a black beast of a horse, which snorted and stomped in anger as I crossed the finish line a nose ahead of it. And then I envisioned my friends, my makeshift family, running to my side and congratulating me, showering me with flowers and a giant first-place ribbon.
Just like that, I figured out part of the meaning behind the key that was the latest clue.
“Cora,” I said, painfully aware that I was about to violate my own edict to stay away from the grim topic of the letter writer, “do me a favor and fire up your laptop.”
She did so as the others all watched, curiosity stamped on their faces. Something in my voice must have told them that the chase was back on.
“Ready,” Cora said.
“See what you can find out about the Pabst Mansion and any connections Suzanne Collier might have to it.”
Cora stared at me curiously for a moment before smiling. “Of course!” she said, starting to tap at her keys.
The others were staring at me with confusion, so I explained. “That number one sign on the key and the beer on the paper. I think it means Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
Since both Duncan and Mal were relatively new to the city and might not know the history, Cora summarized her findings even as she kept searching. “The Pabst Mansion served as home to Captain Frederick Pabst—the founder of the Pabst Brewing Company—and his family back at the turn of the twentieth century. The opulent structure later passed into the hands of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and it served as home to priests and nuns for the next sixty-plus years. Back in the seventies it was nearly demolished, but a historic preservation group stepped up and saved it. After some painstaking restoration, it now stands surrounded by modern-day buildings in downtown Milwaukee and is open to the public for tours.” Cora paused with her typing and looked up at the others. “Their Christmas decorations and tours are quite famous and popular.” She went back to her keyboard and started tapping again, her eyes scanning her screen.
“So you think that key might have something to do with this mansion?” Duncan asked.
“I do,” I said, hoping I was right. The deadline was rapidly approaching.
For the next minute or two, the room was silent, except for the light tapping sound of Cora hitting her keys. Everyone looked pensive and hopeful, but warily so.
Finally, Cora leaned back in her seat and said, “Bingo! Suzanne Collier sits on the board of directors for the historic preservation group responsible for maintaining the Pabst Mansion.”
Duncan sighed and shook his head, a hapless look on his face. “Mack is right. That’s too much coincidence for anybody. But now that we know who we need to go after, we have to figure out how. All we have so far is supposition and circumstantial evidence, none of which would be enough to make an arrest, much less get a conviction. Plus, we don’t know if she’s working alone. Based on the facts so far, I’d say it’s a good bet she isn’t. And as was pointed out before, someone with that kind of financial clout won’t be easy to catch.”
He was right, of course, and I knew that my problems were far from over. But at least now I knew who the enemy was, one of them, anyway. Suzanne Collier had just been demoted from hunter to prey, and for the first time in days, I felt hope again for the future.
To be continued . . .