Murder Wears a Mask Read online

  Mr. Cardew looked at Troy in disbelief. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t have any kids,” Troy said. “But if I did . . . I’d want to make sure they were treated right, in life and in death. If you’re not satisfied with the investigation so far, then make some noise about it. I’m guessing you could get some attention if you wanted to. Mrs. Krymanski can’t afford a lawyer who can pursue her son’s case so that all the answers come out. But money isn’t going to stand in your way, is it?”

  “Money doesn’t mean anything. It won’t bring Tyra back.”

  “Then don’t let Tyra be lost,” Troy urged.

  His drive back to Settler Springs was haunted by the image of a girl he’d never met when she was alive. When he thought of her, it was with the Princess Leia’s mask on her face and the bruises on her neck. He’d seen enough death in Afghanistan, but this was different. This girl wasn’t in a war zone.

  He didn’t feel like going home, and that was unusual. Home was a sanctuary, and Arlo was all the welcoming committee he wanted. But as he drove past the library and saw that the lights were still on, he pulled his car into a parking space and went inside.

  Kelly was helping a patron at the computer station when she saw him enter. Her eyes widened and he could practically see question marks in her pupils. Despite his disheartened mood, she made him smile. She didn’t hide her feelings or her thoughts, and her face revealed everything. He paused by the magazine rack until she had finished assisting the patron, who put on headphones and paid no attention to anyone.

  “You’re alone here?”

  “Carmela has choir practice.”

  “Is it safe for you to be here alone?”

  She laughed. “It has been so far,” she said. “Are you in here to rob the petty cash drawer?”

  “Maybe next time. When do you close up?”

  “Why? Did you learn anything from the Cardews?”

  “Mr. Cardew doesn’t understand why no one asked him real questions. He doesn’t believe Lucas killed her or that he got her pregnant or drove all the way down to Golden Ridge—”

  “Lucas doesn’t have a driver’s license or a car, he’s fourteen!” Kelly interrupted.

  “I know. That’s what Mr. Cardew said, too. He doesn’t know that the Krymanskis get blamed for everything in town. He just doesn’t get why the local police, and the state police, don’t care enough about finding the real killer.”

  “What did you tell him?’

  “I told him to make a stink about it, more or less. He’s someone people would listen to. If he thinks the crime is being swept under the rug, he can get attention. I think he’d rather be doing something besides grieving.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Kelly said somberly. “It has to be terrible to wake up, day after day, with his daughter’s death the first thought in his head. And then to see blame being placed on a kid who’s so obviously not the killer . . . you know what doesn’t make sense?”

  None of it made sense to Troy. “What?” he asked.

  “Why don’t the police want to find the killer? They have to know, deep down, that Lucas didn’t do it. So that means that there’s a killer loose. Why wouldn’t they want that killer caught? What if he kills again?”

  “If her boyfriend killed her because she was pregnant,” Troy said logically, “there’s no reason to worry about him killing again. He would have killed Tyra to get rid of a problem.”

  “But why would he come all the way out here from Golden Ridge to dump her body in an alley?”

  “Because . . . because he’s from Settler Springs,” Troy reasoned, “and the alley is a place he knows.”

  11

  Not A Chapter in a Book

  Kelly’s stake-out idea didn’t seem so crazy anymore, not once Troy had the time to put all the puzzle pieces into place. It seemed obvious. No one really noticed alleys; they were forgotten streets that worked for short-cuts to get across town, but they weren’t important. Someone who was dealing drugs would have a different perspective of Daffodil Alley. The alley was his office.

  He knew there was no way of talking Kelly out of accompanying him to the alley. He tried, but she was having none of it. When he called her to tell her that he was going to start hanging around the alley to see if anything was going on now that the town was convinced the murder was solved and the killer awaiting trial, Kelly objected immediately.

  “The library closes at 8:30,” she said. “I can change before then—I’ll tell Carmela I’m going running—and I’ll meet you in Daffodil Alley within fifteen minutes.”

  “She’s not going to believe you’ve developed a passion for exercise in the dark,” he said. “The sidewalks in town are so uneven that you’d end up with a broken ankle.”

  “I’m not really going running,” she said. “That’s just an excuse.”

  “Remind me, the next time I’m trying to solve a murder, not to get tangled up with a librarian who reads too many mysteries.”

  Kelly laughed. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

  Hazard was the right word, Troy thought grimly as they entered the alley through a circuitous network of back lots and yards so that they would not be seen entering from either the Roosevelt or the Lincoln ends of the alley.

  He thought she’d give up after the first couple of nights. Nothing happened except they occasionally overheard couples quarreling as they passed through the alley, unaware that their conversation was overheard by two people concealed behind the garbage cans. He thought that she’d be even less enthusiastic when they went to their hiding place the night before garbage pick-up, when the cans were redolent of every noxious odor from discarded cat litter to soiled diapers to food that had passed the date when it was safe for eating. But Kelly didn’t complain, even though, by the time he walked her to her car, each was very conscious of the other’s aroma.

  Kelly didn’t complain, but she was feeling the burden of waiting. Lucas was still locked up, and the Krymanskis, united as a clan against the dark looks they received as they passed by, looked after Tia Krymanski as much as she would let them. She wasn’t overly fond of her in-laws, Kelly knew, and it galled her to be obliged to them for help.

  She showered, washed her hair, and didn’t go to bed until she smelled fragrantly of Bath & Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar Shower Gel. Once in bed, she tried to concentrate on what they’d learned so far.

  Nothing. They’d learned nothing because nothing had happened in the alley. Troy forbade her to ask Mrs. Hammond if there had seemed to be any particular pattern in the drug sales. He’d ordered her to leave Mrs. Hammond out of this entirely. If something went wrong, he had said, the two of them would have to deal with it themselves.

  She realized that he hadn’t tried to sugar-coat the risk, and she supposed she should be appreciative that he allowed her to take part in the stakeouts, however reluctant he had been to agree. She hoped something would happen soon. In the meantime, she would just have to be patient. Sooner or later, the red sports car would return to Daffodil Alley.

  Saturday brought snow, unexpected in November. Watching from inside the library as the flakes fell on the ground, Kelly wondered how she and Troy would be able to hide their presence when fallen snow would reveal their footprints. Triple layers of socks and fleece-lined gloves worked well for warmth, but the borough didn’t plow the alleys, and as the stores closed early on Saturdays, footprints would be all too visible.

  She wasn’t surprised to see Troy come into the library a half hour before closing time.

  “My weekend off,” he answered her quizzical glance.

  “Did you sleep in?”

  “No, I went out to the Trail to run.”

  “It’s beautiful out there in the snow,” she said wistfully.

  “It’s cold out there in the snow,” he said.

  “Wimp.”

  “What do you expect? I was born in Las Vegas.”

  “You were? I never figured you for a Las Vegas type, somehow.”r />
  “I’m not any type. Dad was career military, so we lived everywhere. I stopped by to see if you want to get something to eat after the library closes.”

  She had planned to go home and take a nap after leaving the library. A couple hours of sleep, maybe a little reading and a leisurely cup of tea before going to Daffodil Alley. She opened her mouth to tell him her plans and was dumfounded to hear herself say that she was really hungry for the pierogis and haluski at the diner.

  “What’s a girl with a name like Armello know about Polish food?” he teased her when, an hour later, they were seated at a booth in the diner, waiting for their food to be served.

  “There’s nothing about food that I don’t know,” she answered. “I love ethnic food festivals. Do you go to them? This whole area was a mini-Europe a century ago. The Italians, the Slovaks, the Poles, the Hungarians . . . they all came over to work in the mills and the mines and the foundries. The Americans conquered with their English language, but the immigrants conquered where it counts, in the food.”

  “Does everyone in Settler Springs eat here?”

  “Pretty much, why?”

  “I’m seeing a lot of familiar faces. And they’re seeing us.”

  She looked up, noticed someone she recognized, and waved.

  “Is that bad?” she asked. “You don’t need to worry. I’m not planning to stake a claim on you.”

  Troy waited until the waitress had served their meals; roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and carrots for him; pierogies smothered in onions and butter, and haluski for her.

  She grinned. “There’s nothing like the smell of onions to keep a shy man safe from female machinations.”

  “I like onions,” he said. “I like the smell of them, the taste of ’em . . . so if you ordered the pierogies as a way of making sure that this is just a working dinner, I can’t promise that it’ll work.”

  “I didn’t figure you for shy,” she responded with one of those deft turns of subject that put the navigation of the conversation back under her control. “So tell me, Mr. Police Officer sir, what do we do about the snow?”

  They both looked out the window, where the snow that had fallen all day continued as the afternoon darkened.

  “We could skip tonight,” he said. “I have a fireplace, and this is the perfect night for enjoying a warm fire.”

  “If I were a dealer,” she said, “I’d pick tonight because no one would be paying attention. Except their customers, I suppose.”

  She clearly had no intention of responding to his flirting. He was starting to understand that Kelly Armello didn’t follow, she led. There was a lot more to learn about this self-assured, straightforward woman. In the meantime, back to the working dinner.

  He didn’t think of addicts as customers, somehow, but he supposed Kelly had a point. Still . . .

  “Since you nixed my offer of a warm fire,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to go with Plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  He held up a key, dangling it from his fingers.

  “I rented one of the garages in the Alley,” he said.

  Kelly knew that there were three joined garages, each with large windows that looked out onto the alley. She hadn’t paid much attention to them because no one ever seemed to be going in or coming out of them.

  “How did you know that one was vacant?” she asked, impressed.

  “I didn’t know, until I heard the weather forecast last night. I called the borough secretary, who knows everyone and everything, and told her I need a garage for storage, and did she know of any for rent. My lucky day. I signed the lease this morning after my run.”

  “Do you need a garage for storage?”

  “I just got out of the military,” he scoffed. “I travel light. But it’ll be a notch or two above freezing inside the garage and we won’t get snow on us. We won’t be seen. But we’ll be able to see if anything is going on, and we can keep a thermos of coffee handy. It won’t be anything that AirBnB would advertise, but it’ll beat the garbage can circuit.”

  12

  The Snowy Stakeout

  “It never snows this much, this early in November,” Kelly said when Troy, who had already arrived at the garage, opened the back entrance to let her in. The snow was still falling; her footprints would soon be covered.

  “That’s what you think. I had three neighbors who told me that this was nothing compared to the snows of the 1950s, when towns were shut off and the roads closed.”

  “Not in November,” she countered, sitting down on one of the two lawn chairs he’d brought to the garage that morning, along with a few other odds and ends to buttress his claim that he was using the structure for storage. She accepted the thermos cup of coffee gratefully. She was dressed for the cold and the garage was definitely better than being out in the snow, but coffee made a difference.

  “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  “I’m a librarian, remember?”

  “You read crime novels like I read the sports pages; you’re a weather archive; you’re determined to prove that a kid is innocent of murder when the whole town wants him to be guilty; you’ve been single since you and your ex broke up six months ago and you don’t want to get involved in a relationship. What else should I know about you?”

  The brightness of the white snow provided a strange, pure illumination but it wasn’t easy to see inside the garage. Maybe that made it easier to ask questions like the one he had just posed to Kelly.

  “You left out that I run fast,” she said.

  “I only have that on your say-so. I haven’t seen you run.”

  “Hm. Point made. There is something . . .”

  He felt a sense of apprehension. The boyfriend was still in the picture. She was married, not divorced yet. She was involved with someone else. She didn’t want to get involved with a cop. She just didn’t like him that way.

  “I quit going to church when I was sixteen.”

  “What?” That wasn’t the heart-stopping revelation that he’d expected. “Doesn’t every kid stop going to church at sixteen?”

  “Some do, I guess. But I told my family that I didn’t believe in God, that the church was made up of a bunch of hypocrites, that I could worship God—if I wanted to—when I was running on the Trail and I didn’t need to be in church on Sunday morning.”

  “Kelly, if this is your deep, dark secret, I have to tell you that it’s pretty low on the teen rebellion scale.”

  “My grandfather was a minister. I was really close to my grandfather. When he got cancer, he moved in with us and we took care of him. He was dying, but he told me something I’ve never forgotten. ‘Kelly, if you’re mad at God about something, let God know. He’s big enough to handle it. But if you’re just too lazy to decide what you believe, then you’re cheating yourself and God too.’” Kelly was quiet for a time.

  Troy didn’t interrupt. He still didn’t understand why this was something that she wanted him to know about her, but it was apparent that it mattered.

  “He told me that his dying wish was that I would find God again. In anger, in disappointment, in fear, it didn’t matter. Just find God, he said. Look for God, and find Him.”

  “And?”

  “And I did. I was so angry at God when Grandpa got cancer. When he died, we got cards, letters, calls from people he’d known throughout his ministry. That’s when I realized that believers don’t just listen to sermons, they live them out; those are the people who wear red capes and fly to the rescue. My grandfather had such an impact on so many people’s lives. We never knew. He was just Grandpa.”

  He could sense her smiling even though it was too dark for him to see her expression clearly. “Grandpa’s secret identity was that he was just an ordinary, nice guy. But he was a superhero.”

  “Is this your way of telling me that you’re a practicing Christian and that whatever is going to happen between us in the future won’t happen unless you decide God is okay with it?”

&nb
sp; Kelly stood up and stretched. “You got it,” she said, going over to the window to look out. “Troy!”

  Troy got up and went to the window.

  “There’s a car,” she whispered. “You see it?”

  He saw it. Apparently, a snowy night when most of the town chose to stay inside was a better night for business than Troy would have guessed. The car was covered by the snow, making it impossible to discern its make or its color, but Troy’s instincts told him that beneath the snow was the red sports car that Mrs. Hammond had seen.

  “I’m going out the back door,” he said. “I need to get the license plate number of the car.”

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “No. There’s no reason for two of us to be out there,” he said. “You stay in here and see if you recognize anyone going by.”

  “Troy, I—”

  “This isn’t the time for the red cape, Kelly,” he said. “I’m going to get the license plate number, that’s all. You plant yourself at the window and see if you recognize anyone who approaches the car. You know more people in town than I do.”

  Without waiting for a response, he went to the door at the back end of the garage and went outside. Kelly watched as he vanished into the snow. He had dressed for it, she realized, as she had not, in her dark jeans and dark coat. Troy had on pale gray sweatpants and a white hoodie. Not very warm but designed to let the snow camouflage him if he needed to be outside.

  Taking another sip of her coffee, she watched out the window. The snow was still falling, but now she was grateful for it. It would conceal Troy and maybe keep him safe.

  Troy, despite his Las Vegas birth, had lived in all climate zones during his life and he knew how to make the snow work for him. He moved quickly, crouching behind bushes, trees, and garbage cans to hide. There was a stretch of parking lot that was out in the open, with no convenient hiding spots, just before he’d reach a point where he could read the license plate. As he crouched behind the garbage can, deciding when to make a move, he heard the sound of another car approaching.