Frozen Stiff

possible that someone has a grudge against David and tried to burn him alive because of it, I find it unlikely. He’s a highly respected and beloved surgeon in the community. Even though every one of these incidents points a finger squarely in Hurley’s direction, I feel pretty certain he’s innocent. The public argument between him and David seems a little too coincidental to me.

But if Hurley isn’t guilty, and he’s right in his assumption that someone is trying to frame him, how did they do it? The evidence suggests that someone broke into his house and stole his hair, the potassium cyanide, and the gas can. It also means that whoever stole the stuff would have had to break into my old house to start the fire and into Minniver’s house to poison his food with the potassium cyanide. Hurley has already shown me how easy it is to bypass a door lock with the right tools and the know-how, and the fact that he possesses both makes him look even guiltier. He could have gotten into Minniver’s house easily enough, even without the missing spare key. My old house would have been a bigger challenge since all the doors had dead bolts and I knew David was obsessive about locking them every night, which explains the broken basement window.

Killing Callie hadn’t required any lock picking, and the knife that killed her is easy enough to explain given that it was outside in Hurley’s boat and accessible to anyone who looked there. All someone had to do was lure Callie here.

With that thought I recall her diary, which is still beneath the seat in my car. When I reach down and drag it out, the cell phone I had stashed there comes with it. I’d forgotten all about the phone and when I flip it open it tells me that I’ve missed a call. I look at the displayed number but don’t recognize it. Then I get the smart idea of comparing this number to the ones in my own cell phone, to see if it matches any of them. I go searching through my purse for my phone but can’t find it. Puzzled, I stop and think back to when I left the house, certain I hadn’t seen the phone in the charger. Then I remember grabbing it last night to call 911, and dropping it when I was running through the woods toward my old house.

“Dang it,” I mutter, making a mental note to go back and look for it.

In the meantime, the cell Hurley gave me still has a slight charge left on it so I dial the number of the missed call. It rings several times and just as I become convinced no one is going to answer, someone does.

“Hello?” says a female voice.

“Hello. Who is this?”

There’s a long silence and then the woman says, “You called me. Who is this?”

I almost slip and give my real name, but at the last second I remember who the phone is supposed to belong to. “This is Rebecca Taylor. I received a call from this number on my cell phone so I’m returning it.”

“Are you the private investigator who is looking into Callie Dunkirk’s death?” the woman asks.

“Yes, I am. Why? Do you have something for me?”

“I might.”

“Can I ask who it is I’m speaking to?”

“My name is Andi, short for Andrea. I’m Callie’s sister. When I went into the TV station to pick up some of her things yesterday afternoon, someone mentioned that you’d been there asking a bunch of questions. She gave me your card.”

“Who was that?”

“The girl at the receptionist’s desk.”

“Ah, Misty.”

“Yes. She seemed to think you were working for my mother and me.”

Uh-oh.

“But you’re not. So who are you working for?”

“I can’t reveal that. Sorry.”

“Is it that prick, Mike Ackerman?” Even without her colorful descriptor, the venom in her voice when she mentions his name makes it clear what she thinks of him.

“Why do you think he’s a prick?” I ask, avoiding her question.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she says. “I’m not sticking my neck out so he can chop it off. If you’re working for him, you’ll tell him what I said and then he’ll be coming after me. Next thing you know, I’ll be dead, too, just like my sister.”

Her words hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. Clearly she thinks it was Ackerman who killed Callie.

“You tell that son of a bitch that I’ve already gone to the cops and if anything happens to me they’ll be on him like flies on shit,” she says. She’s trying hard to pepper her words with lots of bravado but I detect an underlying shakiness in her voice that tells me her fear of Ackerman is very real.

Sensing that she is about to hang up, I say, “I’m not working for Mike Ackerman. I can’t tell you who I am working for, but I can tell you it’s not him.” She doesn’t say anything, but I can hear her breathing on the other end so I know she hasn’t hung up yet. “Do you think Mike Ackerman killed your sister?” I ask her. The phone beeps three times just as I finish asking the question and I realize the battery is about to die. All I hear of Andi’s answer is “—did.”

“I’m sorry, you cut out and I didn’t hear you.”

“I said the bastard . . . beep . . . to keep her quiet . . . beep . . . tell his wife . . . beep.” After her last comment is broken up by three more beeps, the phone goes dead.

“Damn it!” I throw the cell aside and hear Hoover whimper behind me. “Sorry, boy,” I say.

I sit and think for a minute about Andi’s final comment, trying to make some sense of the part I heard. The words keep her quiet and tell his wife make me wonder if my suspicions about the relationship between Ackerman and Callie are right.

I turn my attention back to the diary and flip it open to the page with the note about police corruption. As I read it again, something nags at the back of my mind and I struggle to figure out what it is. It isn’t until I look at the dead cell phone that it hits me. Callie’s diary entry mentions a phone call and if there was a phone call, there’d be a record of where it came from. I make a mental note of the time and date of the entry so I can later compare it to calls Callie got. Though the entry may have been written hours or even days after the call, I figure it’s worth a shot. If I had my own cell phone, I could call Bob Richmond and ask him if he’s run Callie’s phone records yet, but since I don’t, it’ll have to wait.

Phone calls aside, it all comes back to Hurley. He is the one thing that is common and central to everything that has happened, though not everyone knows it yet. With that thought in mind, I finish my breakfast and drive over to his neighborhood. I cruise down the street slowly, studying the other houses, and then circle around the block to Harold Minniver’s street. I do this several times, not sure what I’m looking for but feeling like there is something here, something that will help me put all the pieces together.

Eventually I park, leash Hoover, and walk up to Hurley’s house. After several rings of the doorbell and a few knocks, I deduce he isn’t home. Curious, I head off the porch and walk around the side of his house to the garage area where the boat is parked. Nothing looks much different than it did when I was here a couple of nights ago.

I peek through the side window into Hurley’s workshop. Sunlight coming in through the window in the bay door creates several sparks of light within the room. I realize it’s coming from bits of metal scattered about and I remember the metal fragments we found in Callie’s hair. One more piece of damning evidence against Hurley.

I study the other doors in the garage and see that the one to the outside has a dead bolt on it, but the one leading from the workshop to the house has just a keyed knob lock. The dead bolt probably doesn’t offer much of an obstacle to someone with Hurley’s lock-picking talents, and once someone gained access to the workshop, getting into the house proper would be easy. Heck, even I could do that and, in fact, I have. I bypassed one of those knob locks once when I was a teenager and locked myself out of the house. All I had to do was slide my library card into the door crack and use it to push back the latch.

I wander out into Hurley’s backyard, to the rear line of the fence where it butts up against Minniver’s yard. There is police tape across Minniver’s back door, which opens into his garage. Similar doors, similar locks—access to one would make it easy to access the other. And that’s assuming that both Hurley and Minniver were religious about locking their doors. Here in small-town America, people often don’t. Plus there’s the missing key to Minniver’s house.

I head back out to the street, Hoover sniffing the ground as we go. Just before we round the front corner of the house, Hoover stops dead in his tracks and raises his nose to the air. Then he barks excitedly several times.