Holly Martin Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lou Allin
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Holly heard voices outside. Through the calico-curtained window she watched two young men walking toward the house, followed by a mixed breed, German shepherd and collie at a glance. The dog lacked one front leg but handled its mobility without complaint. One boy had an axe over his shoulder, the other carried steel splitting wedges and a maul.
Janet said, “There they are now. Do you want me—”
“Please stay here. I’ll talk to them outside. Thanks for your hospitality.”
She excused herself and met the boys on the deck, explaining her visit. The dog was friendly if muddy. She gave its head a rub but steered it away from her pants. “I’d like to talk to you separately, if that’s all right. Maybe you could come back in a few minutes, Mike.” She saw them give each other odd looks. Mike pulled out a pack of bargain-priced Canadian brand cigarettes, lit up, and strolled off, his short legs slightly bowed like a sailor’s. Chances were that after all this time, they’d rehearsed their stories. She should have been out here earlier, from the minute they’d learned the results of the tox scan.
The taller at well over six feet, Billy wore green workpants and a hoodie. His clothes were covered in fir debris and the occasional oil stain. One temple bore a scar, the kind fashionable for nineteenth-century dueling Europeans. His nose was blunt but strong, and his hands could rip phone books in half.
She smiled to put him at his ease, but his eyes cut to her notebook. “The ranger says that he believes you and Mike camped in Botanical the night Angie Didrickson died.”
“Angie?” he repeated. “Mom said something, but I—”
“Angie drowned that night.” Surely news would have travelled fast. What was wrong here?
“Oh yeah, I heard about that. I was sorry.” A nuance of emotion passed over his face, raising a dimple in one cheek. Juvenile or ingenuous or both? Oddly enough, his voice cracked from time to time, mild as a girl’s.
“Did you know her?” He attended Edward Milne, but they could have met at twenty teen haunts. The video stores, Willie Blues Snack Shop, the A and W, Sooke Pizza and Wink’s, which nailed the student lunch trade. Aside from school, the Port Renfrew teens got to Sooke from time to time, hitched a ride, stayed with friends or relatives. Rock concerts in Victoria would pull them farther east. K-Os was playing at the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre.
“Not really.”
What did that mean? “You did or you didn’t?” His hesitance made her suspicious, but the ambiguous teenspeak often meant “yes, but I’m afraid to admit it.”
He looked off to where Mike was tossing sticks for the dog.
“I might have seen her in Sooke...but we never talked.”
“She was beautiful. I imagine you’d remember her.”
“Yeah.” He blinked but didn’t meet her gaze. To some that spelled guilt, but the gesture was inborn in his people. It was disrespectful to lock eyes, especially a youth to an elder. Did he seem nervous? “What did you do that night in the park?”
Her begging-the-question technique worked. Instead of denying being there, he seemed to search his memory. “Made a fire. Cooked hot dogs. Went for a swim. We built a fort of driftwood.” Common practice for beachcombers. More shelter from the wind than rain. But she didn’t remember any food debris. Maybe here were two teenaged environmentalists.
“Can you give me a timeline? Start with dinner.”
“Uh, six, seven. I dunno. Before dark. We just hung out and talked.”
If she recalled correctly, dark came about eight o’clock.
“About what?” The devil was in the details, Roy had taught her. Once a suspect makes one mistake, he makes others. The cascade effect.
“Stuff. I mean girls, movies, school. Nothing important. The sunset was awesome. And we saw a couple of cruise ships. My cousin works on one. It’d be sweet to go to Alaska.”
“Then what happened? See anyone else?”
“Uh-uh.” He spread out his hands. One leaking blood blister dominated a finger, the price of working with wood. “Went to bed, I guess. Ten maybe. On the beach. We had sleeping bags.”
“By the big butt stump of driftwood? Was that your camp?”
Suddenly a wary look crossed his face, as if he knew he might have said the wrong thing, placed himself in the wrong spot. Innocence and experience collided. “Maybe down a kilometre from that. The shelter wasn’t anything special, more dug out in the sand. The main logs were already there.”
Why was he trying to minimize the fort now? Distance himself from where the girl had died? The sun flickered behind a cloud, but she felt the heat coming. “All right, Billy,” she said, and relief flooded his square face.
Mike took his turn next. The habit of reclusiveness wasn’t as strong for him. His eyes weren’t as intelligent as Billy’s, more crafty like a fox, though those animals were oddly absent on the island. Mike confirmed much of what Billy had said. Perhaps they had practiced their stories. A total consistency often spelled collusion. “So you went to bed around—”
“Moonrise. Eleven-fifteen.”
Strange that he named an exact time. Moonrise could be checked. “And you saw no one?”
“Guess we wouldn’t.” He toed his workboot over a knot in a board. “You’re not allowed to camp on the beach. But we were here in the time long ago. It’s really all ours.” That he stopped without making derogatory remarks about whites spoke for his self-control, but perhaps he didn’t want to antagonize the police.
“I don’t disagree.” She looked at her watch as if she were growing short of time and wanted to wrap up the interview. “That was a pretty cool shelter you made on the big fir root. Gotta hand it to you.”
He seemed flattered, rubbing a hand through his thick hair. “I’m pretty good at it. Get the pieces to fit just right. Don’t need no nails at all. Nice and tight. The wind gets up at night.”
She excused him. So there was a discrepancy in their description of where they had camped and the time they went to bed. But both denied seeing anyone on the beach.
Before leaving, she dropped one more penny onto the table as Billy rejoined them. “I need your fingerprints.”
They both tensed and looked at each other for a brief moment. Beads of moisture freckled Mike’s forehead. Billy cleared his throat. “We didn’t touch anything....not that there was anything to touch. Are you gonna check the driftwood?”
He gave a childish laugh, then coughed into his hand.
For once, a lie came in handy. On a beach, with winds and tide, not many pieces of forensics would remain, and not for long. “Of course not. But a car was broken into in the parking lot that week. A couple of prints showed up. This will eliminate you.”
Was that a visible relaxation in their muscular shoulders?
“Sure, why not?” Billy said.
Normally the print kit wasn’t carried in cars, but with distances making time a premium, Holly had changed the protocol. She took them to the Impala, opened the trunk and set up the equipment on a picnic table, offering them a wet towelette at the end of the process. Her real intention was to check against the prints on the condom package. Teenaged boys sure as hell didn’t use them in a same-sex encounter. But as ubiquitous as condoms were, often given out free, one might have lingered in their wallets or backpacks. And if so, that might break their story. Had one of them, or both, had sex with Angie?
Holly pulled in to the detachment as Ann was closing up. “How did it go?” the woman asked.
“They seem like good boys, but something is going on,” she said, explaining her procedures.
Ann gave a sign