She was nodding. “I don’t think he’d go home. Too suspicious. He’s supposed to give a statement tomorrow. And all of his things are here. We’ve been in his room. He didn’t clear out.”
“Weapons?”
“No, no drugs either.”
“I figure he left because he’s trying to pull together some kind of alibi.” They reached the reception area, where several other cops were gathered. “You know, Tyler Quade skated on Monica O’Neal’s murder. Possibly Eleanor Brady’s. We don’t know about that, yet. So he has a history of getting away with murder. Literally. Maybe he thinks he can here, too.”
“That’ll be tough. To come up with a logical alibi.”
“But he doesn’t know about the room being bugged.” She smiled coldly as they reached the first floor. “We got him. We just have to find him.”
“We will,” he said, and meant it. “But right now I need to see Bernadette,” he said. They were walking through the foyer of the old inn.
“In a second. They’ve all gathered in the dining room.”
“No,” he said, “Not in a second. She called me. Was freaked,” he reminded Maggie. “I want to see her now.”
“Fine, Romeo. We’re on our way.” She shot him a cool-your-jets glance and before he could respond, as he passed by the glass doors that opened to the back side of the hotel, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a truck rolling into the parking lot. The big rig slid to a stop in the slot next to his Jeep. And behind the steering wheel? None other than the man in question.
Tyler Quade, as if he hadn’t a worry in the world, parked his rig and, holding two white sacks, hopped to the ground. What the hell? Why would he return?
“Looks like we got lucky,” Lucas said under his breath, then made a beeline for the door. If Quade didn’t realize he’d been filmed, he would probably try to lie about his whereabouts and assume that if anyone had seen him with Jo-Beth earlier, it wasn’t a big deal. Even if his DNA was found on the bed, his sperm inside Jo-Beth, he could claim they hooked up earlier, and so what?
In the vaporous light from one security lamp, Quade glanced around the area and seemed slightly nervous at the sight of cop cars, their lights flashing, pulsing red and blue on the sides of the old inn. No doubt he hadn’t expected Jo-Beth’s body to be discovered so quickly. He’d probably thought no one would suspect her dead until the next morning and by that time, he could have either paid for alibis or been in and out of the hotel and different local establishments often enough to muddy the waters of his whereabouts.
Surely he would expect to be the primary suspect, but Maggie could be right. Quade might just be arrogant enough to think he could pull a fast one on the cops. After all, he’d done it before.
Not this time!
Lucas burst through the doorway.
“Lucas!” Maggie yelled behind him as he sprinted to the lot. “Detective Dalton! Don’t! Do not approach the suspect!”
Tyler Quade froze, hesitating between his truck and Lucas’s rig. “What the fuck?”
“Tyler Quade,” Lucas yelled at the moment he realized his service weapon was still locked in his vehicle.
Stupid!
But he couldn’t let the suspect get away.
Lucas ordered, “Police! Freeze!”
“What? Why?” A mask of innocence. Yeah, right. The lying prick!
“Drop the bags and put your hands in the air.” Lucas kept walking toward him, eyes locked with Quade’s gaze, and silently prayed the bastard didn’t have a gun. If he made a move, Lucas would have to leap out of the way.
“Are you crazy?” Quade yelled back at him. “Dalton, what is this?” Now a nervous tic had started just under his eye and his muscles were tensing. “What’s going on?”
“Just do it!”
“Hey, man, I just went for takeout for me and Jo-Beth,” he said, and there it was, the alibi, a bald-faced lie coming into play.
Like hell! “I said drop the bags! Raise your damned hands! Do it. Now!”
“What the fuck’s going on around here?” Quade asked, but seeing the expression on Lucas’s face, he did let the bags fall to the ground. One sack exploded as the soft drinks inside hit hard pavement. Dark liquid splashed and foamed upward, soaking the paper. “All the cop cars . . . holy shit. What happened?” To credit Quade’s acting skills, his face did change expression, as if it had just dawned on him that somehow he could be a suspect in some horrendous crime. “Hey—wait. What’re you doing?”
Still the tic continued to throb.
From behind him, Maggie’s voice, low and loud. “Tyler Quade, put your hands in the air.”
“I don’t understand,” Tyler said uneasily.
“Don’t say another word,” Lucas warned. “Just do as Officer Dobbs commanded. And do it now.”
Quade was shaking his head, still acting confused. “But I—”
“I’ve got this!” Maggie was suddenly beside Lucas, weapon drawn, aiming straight at Quade. “Police,” she yelled at Quade as Lucas reached his Jeep. He reached into his pocket, found his remote key, and pushed the button to release the door lock. Maggie ordered, “I said put your hands in the air and then drop to your knees.”
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Quade argued, backpedaling a bit and easing closer to his truck. “But you’ve got it all wrong.”
“Now!” she screamed. “Do it!”
Quade was cool. Aside from that telling little twitch. “Okay, okay, but I’m tellin’ ya, whatever the hell this is, it has nothing to do with me. You got it all wrong.” As he raised his hands and fell to his knees, he sent a look in Lucas’s direction that silently spoke volumes. The hairs on the back of Lucas’s neck raised. No way was Tyler Quade giving up so easily.
Lucas opened the door to his truck to grab his gun.
Maggie stepped behind Quade to cuff him.
In that second, when her weapon wasn’t trained on him, Quade reared up and threw her against his truck.
Bam!
The side of her head hit the steel door. Quade jumped forward and rolled to the front of the truck just as Maggie, stunned, raised her gun and fired. The shot went wild.
Somewhere nearby a woman screamed. Other voices shouted. Quade, bent low, started scrambling through the parking lot as pandemonium ensued.
As Quade started to run, Lucas took off after him, rounding the front of the truck. Voices shouted around him as Quade ducked behind a minivan.
“Give it up!” Lucas ordered. “Freeze!”
But the other man ran, dodging and hiding between the cars as other cops took up the chase and onlookers watched in horror.
No way, with all the people around, could the officers risk a shot.
As Quade cut to a hedgerow, Lucas sprang.
He tackled Quade on the fly.
“Ooof!”
Together they fell, skidding over the thin gravel and hard pavement.
The side of Lucas’s face scraped over the uneven asphalt. Pain screamed through his jaw. Still he wrestled with the muscular man. Cursing and spitting, rolling and kicking, Quade tried to wriggle free and escape. “Get the fuck off me!”
Blood ran down Lucas’s face, but he had his arms around Quade. “You’re done, Quade. It’s over! We got you.”
“Bullshit!” Quade yelled, rolling and bucking, trying to get free. “Let me go!”
“Not a chance,” he said, breathing hard.
“You fucker!” Quade kicked upward, breaking Lucas’s grip. Rounding, Quade swung wildly at Lucas’s head.
Crack! Quade’s fist pounded into Lucas’s nose and he heard cartilage crunch. Blood spurted. Pain exploded through his head, and Lucas swung hard enough that his fist smashed into Quade’s jaw so hard he felt the bone give.
Quade howled and rolled away, scrabbling, trying to find purchase. “You broke my goddamned jaw! You fuckin’ cocksucker!”
In his peripheral vision, Lucas saw a streak of black and brown, a growling mass that leaped, white te
eth snapping, black gums pulled back as Roscoe clamped down on Quade’s arm.
He squealed in pain. “Get off, you fucker!” he yelled at the dog, but Roscoe held on. “Get him off me!”
“Stop!” a voice yelled, and Lucas spied Maggie, her gun trained on Quade. “Lucas, call off your dog! I got this.” Then to the suspect, “If you move one muscle, Tyler Quade, so much as roll your eyeballs,” she swore, “I’ll blast your sorry ass to hell.” Her eyes were hard, her lips flat, a bruise already visible under one eye.
“Roscoe! Release!” Lucas ordered and, breathing heavily, pulled himself to his feet.
The dog immediately slackened his jaw and backed up, his gaze still trained on Quade.
“Cuff him,” Maggie said, her set of handcuffs dangling from her free hand as the muzzle of her pistol never wavered, was trained directly on the suspect. She tossed the cuffs to Lucas. “Tyler Quade,” she said, “you’re under arrest for the murders of Monica O’Neal and Jo-Beth Leroy. You have the right to remain silent . . .”
As she continued to repeat the Miranda warning, Lucas, still bleeding, doomed for at least one, and more likely two, black eyes, yanked Quade’s arms behind his back and snapped on the cuffs. It felt good. Because he knew, without a doubt, this time Quade was going down.
CHAPTER 38
Averille, Oregon
Now
Lucas
Lying in a hospital bed despite being hyped up from the investigation and fight, Lucas waited impatiently to be released. He had work to do and couldn’t be bothered with biding his time while doctors, nurses, and aides tended to other people. He was contemplating just leaving when in this night of bad karma, his luck just got worse.
The last person Lucas wanted to deal with was his father.
But here Jeremiah Dalton was, striding into the ER of the small hospital in Seaside and acting as if he owned the place.
“What in God’s good name is going on?” he demanded when he found his son on a bed separated by the other patients in the ER by thin curtains. “By the way, you look like hell.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Lucas mocked. “Don’t try to cheer me up.” But he knew Jeremiah wasn’t exaggerating. He looked worse than he felt and he felt pretty damned bad. Though Lucas hadn’t sustained any life-threatening injuries, he was more than beat-up with two black eyes, split knuckles, and a face scraped raw in places. But Quade had it worse with a broken jaw and more than a few abrasions, nothing that would keep him out of court for the charges that were being filed against him.
That was the good news.
The bad? That the old man had shown up. Lucas couldn’t help but wonder why. He’d never been a doting father, and there had never been much love lost between father and son, so why the hell had he shown up at Grace Memorial Hospital?
“Sir, you’ll have to leave,” a nurse said, scurrying over from a central hub, where other nurses and aides gathered and a series of monitors provided information on the patients. In blue scrubs, she was tall and thin, with a straight black ponytail and a no-nonsense attitude.
“This is my son,” Jeremiah stated, and she glanced over to Lucas, who gave a short nod. He was feeling rough, cotton wadding still jammed up one nostril, an ice pack pressed to the right side of his face, a massive headache pounding behind his eyes. He’d put two calls in to Bernadette; both had gone straight to voice mail, where he’d left a couple of messages. She hadn’t called him back.
“I’m leaving,” Lucas said, and the nurse frowned.
“A doctor needs to release you.”
“I’ll sign myself out,” he said, rolling off the bed. “It’s a broken nose. I’ll live.”
She was undeterred. “Hospital policy—”
“Be damned,” he said as his feet hit the floor and he found his wallet, keys, and phone. Except that his car was back at the hotel. He’d arrived at the hospital, under protest, by ambulance. His father’s vehicle was obviously the fastest means of transportation back to Averille.
“Let’s go,” he said to the old man as he pulled on his boots. “I need a ride.”
“Mr. Dalton,” the nurse cut in, “Detective, I strongly advise—”
“Duly noted.” He knew he’d survive. He’d only come to the hospital because of department policy.
“There’s paperwork,” she said, and stepped away from the bed as if to find the proper forms. He didn’t wait, just headed for the exit.
His father kept up with him. “What was that all about, the commotion at the inn?” Jeremiah wanted to know as they walked out of the ER to the night, where a thin drizzle was beginning to fall.
Once they were in the Caddy, Jeremiah fired up the engine. “So what happened?” he asked as he drove south through the town.
So that was what this was all about. Of course. “I can’t tell you anything that might compromise the investigation.”
“I’m not asking for that.” He drove out of town and Lucas watched as the lights of Seaside faded behind them.
“A woman was murdered,” he said. “ID isn’t being given out until next of kin is notified.”
Jeremiah nodded. He’d probably gleaned that much already. “And?”
“And it looks like we might finally have Monica O’Neal’s killer behind bars.” While his head pounded and his father drove ever south, the windshield wipers slapping at the rain, he sketched out what he could of the story, giving out the same details that the PIO would offer in a press release, including the fact that Quade was the suspect.
“So you think Tyler Quade killed the O’Neal girl?” Jeremiah frowned.
“That surprises you?”
“Oh, I’ve learned not to let anything surprise me much,” he said. “But I am hoping that the sheriff’s department will keep Camp Horseshoe out of this as much as possible.”
“Kinda hard to do as both victims and the alleged killer were counselors at the time.”
“I know, but the more I can distance any of this nasty business from the camp, the better. I’ve got serious buyers interested. We’re talking real money here, son.” He nodded to himself and Lucas bit back a sharp retort. The only time his father ever referred to him as his son was when he wanted something.
“You don’t think that money should go to Naomi?”
“What? No.” Jeremiah’s face turned sour. “Her father left that property to the church. Specifically. The gift was by the book, all on the up-and-up. We’ve been through the legalities during the divorce. She contested the gift, but it was a done deal.” His lips twisted a bit and he slid a sly look in Lucas’s direction. “Of course she wasn’t happy about it, no way. The phrase ‘mad as a wet hen’ comes to mind. But,” he said, nodding to himself, “it was a done deal. Fair and square.”
They drove in silence, the old man’s hands clenched around the wheel, his knuckles showing white. “So, I just want all this commotion to go away, you know, the stink of any scandal to dissipate so I can sell the property.”
“Why is it so important?”
“Finally got interested buyers.” He stared straight ahead.
“So you said. But there’s more to it, isn’t there?” The old man was holding back; Lucas could sense it.
“I just want to pull up stakes,” he said. “Start fresh. Reorganize the church, maybe start a new camp.”
That sounded suspicious. Why now? Why not here, where he already had the property? “Where would you go?”
“I was thinkin’ Montana. Pretty country there. God’s country.” He squinted as a car going the opposite direction drove past, its headlights washing the interior for a second and, in that spray of light, Lucas saw the set of his father’s jaw, the little downturn of his mouth. He wanted something. Bad. And somehow showing up at the hospital and demanding that Lucas, as a cop and out of some sense of misaligned duty to the old man, could help.
“Where in Montana?” he asked as they rounded the curve of the road as it swept around the cliff face of Neahkahnie Mountain. “It’s a bi
g state.”
Jeremiah shrugged. “Not sure. Helena, maybe. Lots of land available.”
“And something else,” Lucas guessed, starting to understand. His father wanted three things in life: a church where he could be the spokesman of God, enough money to have a decent lifestyle, and, of course, a woman. He’d been long without all three. Selling the property and moving would satisfy his first two needs but didn’t explain the third. “Who is she?” Lucas asked.
“What?”
“The woman in Montana. Your girlfriend, if that’s what you call it when you’re on the north side of sixty.”
“I don’t have—” He started to argue, then slid a glance at his son. For once, he didn’t try to bullshit Lucas.
“She got a name?”
His father hesitated and must’ve decided lying wouldn’t work. Lucas was, after all, a detective, and Jeremiah Dalton hadn’t been known for his discretion when it came to the ladies. “Fine. Winona.”
“How old is she?”
“What does it matter?”
“How old?”
He didn’t respond and Lucas got a sick feeling in his gut.
“I’m gonna find out.”
“Twenty-five.”
Lucas let out a long whistle. “Let me guess, her family wants to invest in the church. Jesus, Dad, she’s younger than Leah.”
“Do not use the Lord’s name in vain with me.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Lucas charged. “Blasphemy? When you’re contemplating what? Marrying a woman little more than a third your age and starting a new life, creating a church out of the money you made from your latest ex? You’re unbelievable!”
“She loves me.”
“Of course she does,” he mocked. “Don’t they all? Man, you’ve gone through them and they just keep getting younger all the time.”
“At least they’re not married when I get involved with them.”
Lucas felt the bite of that one. He deserved it, but his affair with Naomi was long over, past history. He wasn’t going to be dragged into a fight about it all over again. He itched to get out of Jeremiah’s SUV and almost told his father to pull over, that he’d walk the remaining miles to Averille, but he needed to return as quickly as possible. Unfortunately Jeremiah’s Caddy was the fastest means of transportation. “How the hell did you meet her?” he asked. “This Winona?”