Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
The ground was spongy under our feet as we moved through the wooded path and under the blockade that was intended to keep trespassers from entering the Bullock Memorial Bird Sanctuary, the old mansion at the heart of the conservancy.
I couldn’t help but appreciate the cosmic balance that was seeing this mystery begin and end with birds. It had been birds that brought Sebastian to Raven Creek in the first place, and now, among the birds, we were hoping to find Melody.
Connor had told the detectives he hadn’t killed her, he had just incapacitated her to make it seem like she had skipped town. He had been hoping the appearance of guilt would be enough to keep the investigation focused on her, and in a way, he’d been right to believe that. So many of the people involved in looking for the killer—me included—had locked in on Melody’s disappearance as proof that she was guilty of something or lying low for a nefarious reason.
Connor had insisted over and over again that he had no idea what had happened to Deacon, though.
Considering everything he had confessed to, thanks to my lurking outside the interrogation room, I had to believe he really didn’t know where Deacon was. I was beginning to think Sebastian’s ex being in town was entirely due to Deacon wanting to get back in his former boss and boyfriend’s good graces.
Connor had admitted to so much that we were halfway up to the old Bullock mansion and Detective Martin was still helping fit together a lot of the pieces I’d found on my own, but the motivations were as tangled as a spider’s web. It was such a mess I wondered how it would have been solved at all without Connor foolishly breaking into my house to target me. If he had just left well enough alone, he probably would have gotten away with it.
As it was, it was a plot so thick Agatha Christie would have needed a few whiteboards to unravel it all.
“So you’re saying Sebastian was never the target at all?” I was glad to be a regular runner, because the uphill climb to the mansion had others in our party huffing and puffing and taking breaks every few yards. Rich and Detective Kim were right behind us, but a few of the officers who had come along were having a really hard time.
“Yeah, that shocked me too, because that’s what got all this started. But apparently it was all just a case of wrong bedroom, wrong time. Sebastian switched with Melody because he needed the blackout blinds, and that switch ended up being what killed him. The killer snuck in and stabbed who he thought was his intended target. Sebastian was just in the wrong bed. Poor guy.”
The cursed Musical Bedrooms struck again. “So Melody was the target all along, then?”
“Yup. Hold on, this gets crazier. Andrew was the one who killed Sebastian.”
“ What? That’s insane. So who did Connor kill?”
“Connor killed Andrew. Self-preservation, he claims. Apparently, Andrew was a pretty well-known scammer and had ways of making dirty money clean again. He had helped Melody set up that LLC, but she’d tried to cut him out of the payout—I think you figured some of that out when you saw the bank statement and heard them arguing by the creek. Melody wasn’t the only one on Sebastian’s staff stealing from him, though; so was Connor. But when Andrew killed Sebastian instead of Melody, he told Connor that with the cash cow dead, he had no reason to protect them anymore and he was going to share all the details of their scams with the police. I think Andrew was hoping we would think Melody and Connor had committed the crimes together. Connor admitted to us that he made a deal with Andrew to buy his silence, but when they met up, Connor killed him. With Andrew gone, he planned to pin both crimes on Melody, which is why he hid those gloves in her room. Melody had no idea about Andrew’s murder, so when Connor asked her to meet him out here on the fourth of July, she went willingly, because she still trusted him.”
“Well, that certainly explains the mysterious meeting at the creek. Did Connor say he was the one who sent me those pictures?”
“No. We asked, and he claims not to know anything about the photos.”
“We already knew Melody was probably up to something, but you said Connor was stealing from Sebastian too?”
Martin shook her head in disbelief. “According to Connor, the lawyer told him that Melody was using his real estate accounts to skim funds off the top of Sebastian’s books, making it look like she was renting a studio space for an office that didn’t exist.”
“That explains the statement I saw perfectly!” I said triumphantly, thrilled that my little clue was somehow useful.
“She’d been doing this for ages , and I guess Deacon found out what was going on. She convinced Sebastian that Deacon was the one taking the money, which was why he cut Deacon out of his life. But Sebastian was starting to get an idea that it hadn’t been Deacon who was lying to him, and the lawyer knew he had to cut and run. Because Connor hadn’t realized what Melody was up to and was running his own scam to steal from Sebastian. He was redirecting funds from several online accounts where he was posting Sebastian content without Sebastian knowing about it and taking the revenue for himself.”
“And then Connor decided to tie up loose ends and just make Melody the scapegoat?”
“Exactly. He figured that with Melody on ice—hopefully not literally—she would take the blame for everything, especially when a forensic accountant started looking at the company’s accounts and it became obvious what was going on.”
“That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. Jealousy and a broken heart made sense to me. Losing a job made sense to me. But if Sebastian’s death was an accident and this was all just about money, it’s bonkers.” It did now make sense why Andrew had been trailing after Sebastian’s book tour, though. He hadn’t planned to kill Sebastian; he’d been planning to shake Melody down for money and then kill her if she didn’t pay up.
We had arrived at the crumbling steps leading up to the old Bullock mansion. The trees around the old house had developed a thick canopy overhead thanks to years without any kind of maintenance. In the dying light of evening, it felt like it was already night in here.
Detective Martin turned on a flashlight, waiting until the rest of the group caught up.
As the officers huffed up behind us, Martin said, “We did some research on Andrew after the murder, and while he isn’t working for any known corporation and certainly isn’t making corporate money, he is a lawyer and has a degree in tax law. When we went through his documents, it looked like he had done extensive research on the value of properties not only in Raven Creek but in a half dozen other towns in Washington and Oregon. He had a half-finished presentation on the possible value of crafting an ‘Out of the Box Tourist Center.’ Basically, he was trying to find a town where he could create a cookie-cutter environment to sell to any buyer with enough money. We think he was testing the water here to see how hard it would be to get locals to buy into the pitch and invest their own money in it. When he started to double and triple the value of properties and still wasn’t getting bites, that seemed to push him over the edge a little.
“That’s why he was so desperate to get the money Melody owed him, so he could back up his ruse with real cash. When we talked to Leo, he said Andrew had told him that if didn’t sell, he was going to tear down the trees on the other side of the street and build a grocery store twice as big to put him out of business anyway. That seems to be the point where your friend lost his cool.”
With all the officers gathered and armed, Martin looked at me and Rich. “You two stay out here. I could get in enough trouble just letting you tag along, so stay out of the building and let us do this, okay?”
For once in my life, I wasn’t planning to argue. The police went into the building, and we watched their flashlight beams split up and move from room to room. After a few minutes we couldn’t hear them anymore.
“Did Detective Kim tell you the whole saga?”
“It was like having someone explain all three seasons of Succession to me. There were too many double-crosses to keep track of.”
“I can’t believe after all this that Sebastian wasn’t actually the target after all.”
A group of crows settled into the branches over the house and started chattering loudly with each other.
For the second time that night I was reminded of Honey’s haunting prophecy.
The wrong person died.
I had no idea how she’d known, but I was never going to doubt something she told me ever again. I didn’t really believe in psychics, or at least I hadn’t until today, but her words had been spooky and foretelling, even if she hadn’t been able to point me to a killer or save the lawyer from getting a taste of his own medicine.
“Do you think she’s still alive in there?” I asked.
Rich waited too long to answer, so I knew what he was thinking even though he said, “I hope so.”
I was pessimistic as well, until a sharp cry from inside the mansion sent the crows scattering into the night air and beams of flashlights racing through the house to converge in a room on the house’s second floor.
“Send in the EMTs,” came a voice through the window.
A pair of EMTs had been along for the hike and were nervously biding their time next to us, but the moment they were called for, their unease transformed into focus. They picked up their heavy bags and the wheeled stretcher they’d brought and ran into the house together.
Radio sounds crackled through the night, and excited shouts of directions were too muddled for Rich and me to clearly understand the words, but the tone seemed to indicate they weren’t bringing out a corpse.
A few minutes later the EMTs reemerged, two uniformed officers at their heels. On the stretcher—which bounced precariously over the uneven sidewalk that had fallen into disrepair—was the supine figure of Melody Fairbanks. She was pale like a porcelain doll, but her eyes were open and scanning the area around her. She looked weak, but I couldn’t see any obvious sign of injury on her except dark bruising around her wrists and some superficial scratches on her arms and face.
Whatever she’d been through, she hadn’t had a good two days, but she was alive, and that was more than two others could say this week.
The quartet disappeared into the murky darkness down the path, and the detectives and two other officers emerged from the house, their flashlights still bobbing in the night.
The officers silently headed down the path in a hurry, and Detective Kim gave Rich a quick clap on the back before following behind them.
Detective Martin pointed her flashlight to the forest floor, dusting her hands free of some unseen dirt or cobwebs. “I don’t know if that’s the luckiest girl on the planet or not. She’s probably going to end up serving a little time of her own for fraud, but she’s alive.”
“Is she going to be okay?” I asked.
Martin nodded without hesitation. “He had her tied up upstairs in an old hidden passage between rooms. We missed it when we did that initial search after you directed us here, but this time she was making a heck of a racket in there. If she’d been unconscious or hadn’t heard us . . . well. I don’t think any of us would have ever found that pass. Right behind two closets. Connor had no problem with her never being found, let me tell you that.”
I tried to think about what might have happened to Melody if Connor hadn’t tried to kill me as well tonight, and for once I wasn’t at all sorry for being too nosy to stay out of things.
It might have almost gotten me killed, but it had also saved a woman’s life.
That made it worth every risk.