I took a deep breath and turned to Erin. “Where’s your dad?” I asked.
“Mrs. Damon, one of the ladies he did some remodeling for a few months ago, called early this afternoon. One of her pipes had burst and she wanted to know who to call. She didn’t want to bother Dad, and she didn’t want him to go over, but he did anyway. He should be home any time now.”
“Did anyone here touch this?” I asked.
“No way!” Mrs. Riggs responded at once. “I wouldn’t let anyone near it. You’ll take it with you, won’t you?”
Of the three people in the room, Erin, young as she was, seemed most in possession of her faculties. “Can you find me a shoe box?” I asked her.
“A shoe box?” she repeated with a puzzled frown.
“Yes. A shoe box and some string.”
Erin nodded and hurried away.
“What do you need that for?” Belle Riggs asked indignantly. “A shoe box, of all things.”
“I can’t tell whether or not this weapon is loaded. I’ll have to secure it in the box in order to take it down to the crime lab.”
Erin returned at once with the shoe box. “The string is down in the garage. I’ll be right back.”
Carefully I picked up the Browning, holding the grip gingerly between my thumb and fore-finger as I placed it in the box. Television detectives to the contrary, lifting guns with pencils to preserve fingerprints is not only dangerous-you never know whether or not it’s loaded-it ignores the reality that the rough surfaces on most pistol grips are totally unsuitable for fingerprinting techniques.
“The crime lab?” Belle Riggs asked suddenly as though the words had finally penetrated her consciousness. “You don’t think this is connected to what happened. That’s impossible. It couldn’t be. I just wanted the thing out of the house.”
“It’s possible,” I said grimly.
Much as it pained me to admit it, mounting circumstantial evidence made it look more and more as though Detective Kramer was right, and Pete Kelsey was our man. As the saying goes, I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid, and I wasn’t about to ignore facts that jumped up and hit me in the face.
Erin returned, carrying a ball of string and a pair of scissors. I punched holes in the bottom of the box and immobilized the gun, tying it off with a piece of string. At my request, Erin once more disappeared, returning this time with a Magic Marker. Across the top of the box I scrawled the words “Possibly Loaded” in huge red letters.
A dismayed Belle Riggs had retreated to the bed. She sat on the edge of it, rocking back and forth in a dazed sort of way. George came on into the room and sat on the bed beside her, consolingly patting her hand.
“Now, Mama,” he said. “Don’t you worry. It’s going to be all right.”
“But, George, how can they possibly think that Pete…”
Erin had been out of the room during the first exchange, but now she was back. Squatting on the floor in front of me, she looked at me across the gun-laden shoe box, her green eyes flashing fire.
“My father didn’t do this,” she said in a calm, measured voice that belied the smoldering anger in her eyes. “I know my father. He couldn’t.”
There was a whole lot about her father that I knew that Erin Kelsey didn’t. Somebody was going to have to tell her, and I didn’t want that person to be me.
“Who else besides your father has access to this room?”
“No one, except me, I guess,” she answered.
“What was your mother’s maiden name?” I asked.
“Riggs,” Erin Kelsey replied firmly. “What kind of question is that?”
“Your real mother,” I said. “What was her name?”
For the first time, Erin Kelsey’s lower lip trembled as she answered. “Marcia Riggs Kelsey was my real mother, Detective Beaumont. She was the only mother I ever knew. She changed my diapers and bandaged my knees and taught me how to drive. My birth mother’s name was Carol Ann Gentry Kelsey.”
“Where was she from?”
“Ottawa, like my dad.”
“Have you ever met any of your Canadian relatives?”
Erin shook her head. “No. None of them. My dad was sort of an orphan and there was some kind of trouble with my mother’s parents when my parents got married. I think my birth mother was disowned. That’s why we ended up living in Mexico, and that’s where we were when the car wreck killed my mother. But what does any of this have to do with this gun? I don’t understand.”
“I’m just trying to put together some background information.”
“What kind of background information?” Pete Kelsey asked suddenly from the bedroom doorway, startling us all. “What’s going on here?”
I hadn’t heard or seen him arrive, and I have no idea how long he’d been standing there in the doorway. He was still wearing heavy work boots and his sheepskin-lined denim jacket. His eyes took in the entire room in one long, sweeping glance.
Mrs. Riggs leaped off the bed and rushed to the door. “Oh, Peter, I’m so glad to see you,” she gushed breathlessly. “We found a gun in Marcia’s bottom drawer. I don’t have any idea where it came from, but I wanted it out of the house right away, so I…we asked Detective Beaumont here to come pick it up. So he was…”
“A gun?” Pete Kelsey’s question interrupted his mother-in-law’s harangue. “In Marcia’s drawer?”
Erin and I both stood up, leaving the shoe box sitting forgotten on the floor between us.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kelsey,” I said calmly. “I’ll need to ask you a few questions about this.” I made no move to draw my weapon. In that crowded bedroom, that could have been deadly for any one of us.
“Daddy,” Erin began, cutting me off in mid-sentence and taking a halting step toward the doorway. Her action, inadvertent or not, effectively blocked my path to the door.
With a stricken look on his face, Pete Kelsey paused, but only for a fraction of an instant, then he turned and bolted back down the stairway. George and Belle Riggs, Erin, and I all leaped for the door like panicked patrons in a crowded theater responding to a shout of fire. We all jammed into the narrow doorway at once, and I heard the front door slam behind Pete Kelsey long before I ever managed to untangle myself from the others.
Breaking free at last, I pounded down the stairway behind him, but to no avail. By the time I reached the front porch, he was gone. I had no way of knowing if he had escaped on foot or if he was driving his Eagle. I turned to go back into the house to call for assistance, but a determined Erin Kelsey barred my way.
“No,” she said firmly, standing before me with her arms folded across her chest and her chin raised in fiery defiance.
“What do you mean, no?”
“You’re not coming back inside this house without a search warrant.”
“But I need to know if your father’s in his car or on foot.”
“That’s your problem.”
I backed off because I could see she meant it. “What about the gun?” I asked.
“It’ll still be right there where you left it when you come back with a warrant,” she said. “Nobody here is going to touch it, but if that’s what you think, if you believe my father’s a cold-blooded killer, I’m not going to lift a finger to help you. My grandparents won’t either.”
I couldn’t blame her for putting up a fight, and there wasn’t time to explain that asking someone questions wasn’t necessarily the same as accusing him of murder, but standing there on the porch arguing about it was splitting hairs and wasting precious time. I hurried back down to my car and radioed for help, feeling foolish that I didn’t know if our quarry was on foot or traveling by car.
Several uniformed patrol officers responded, arriving within minutes. One street at a time, we combed the immediate area at the far north end of Capitol Hill, but it was useless.
By then Pete Kelsey had disappeared completely into cold, thin air.
Chapter 16
