Page 93 of It Happened on the Lake

J anet Collins didn’t answer her doorbell.

Nor did she respond to several hard raps on her front door.

“Not home?” Chelle asked.

“Probably still at work.”

“Let’s see.” Chelle checked her notepad.

“I’ll radio Suki and see if she can call and check.

I know she works at a used car dealership on Eighty-second, but I don’t have the name of the place.

” She radioed into the station while Rand walked the perimeter of the house, a daylight basement with a brick facade and fenced backyard with long grass and strewn with fallen leaves from the birch trees planted near the house.

A basketball hoop stood on one end of a wide patio with a sliding glass door.

He peered through the glass and found himself looking into a family room with an old plaid couch, a couple of beanbag chairs, and a TV with wires snaking out of it, toward a gaming console on the braided rug.

No one in sight.

Slider locked.

As he rounded a corner to the front of the house, he caught a glimpse of the one room with lights. Through partially open blinds he saw the refrigerator and some cupboards, but no one visible. No movement within.

Chelle tried the door again.

Still no answer.

The garage door had a row of windows above the lower panels. Stretching, Rand was able to peer inside.

“See anything?” Chelle asked.

“Too dark. There’s a flashlight in the Jeep. Glove box.”

Chelle retrieved the flashlight and he shone the beam inside. A four-door Oldsmobile Cutlass was parked in front of a washer and dryer. Lying on the greasy floor next to the two steps leading into the house was a woman.

She wasn’t moving.

Blood was smeared everywhere around her, staining the concrete steps and pooling beneath her head.

“Shit,” he muttered. “I think we found her.” He slipped the flashlight into his pocket and, using a handkerchief, grabbed the handle of the wide garage door and pulled it upward.

Groaning, the door rumbled upward, and he shot through, running straight to the woman and crouching near her.

She was lying face up, her features battered, bruised, and cut, her nose and possibly cheekbones broken, one eye swollen shut, the other fixed.

And she wasn’t breathing.

“Radio in for an ambulance,” he ordered over his shoulder, though he knew it was far too late. There was no pulse. Not even the tiniest breath escaping her cracked, bloody lips.

It looked like someone had pummeled her against the concrete steps, maybe smashed her face into the crumbling concrete edge, soaked as it was with blood, but then either her attacker or she had managed to turn her over.

He felt sick inside.

As used to violent death as he was, it still bothered him to think about what the victim had experienced.

He rocked back on his heels, surveying the garage with its washer and dryer and car in one bay.

Then he tried the light switch.

Nothing.

Odd.

Four panels of fluorescents hanging above and none worked?

If she’d come out here at night, the garage would have been completely dark.

She could have stumbled.

Standing, he swept the beam of the flashlight over the rest of the interior of the garage and noted the upturned laundry basket, lying on the dirty floor, and the rake that was nearby.

An accident? She tripped in the dark when the lights didn’t come on.

She hit her head and had a brain bleed or something and her face got battered to a pulp?

No way.

From the looks of it, she was murdered in her own garage.

At the top of his list of suspects in her homicide was Tristan Vargas /Larry Smith.

Unless Janet had a violent husband, boyfriend, or son, Rand would bet dollars to donuts that Vargas was behind this killing. The lowlife was shutting her up and had moved from dealing drugs and blackmail to homicide.

Or maybe he’d always been a killer.

Could Vargas have decided to murder Janet not because of what she’d mentioned in the voice mail she’d left for Rand at the department, but because she knew of other crimes he’d committed?

Rand thought of the unlikely deaths he was investigating, those near Lake Twilight, most having occurred years before.

What about the last couple of decades?

Where had Vargas lived, under what alias, and were there any unsolved homicides in his wake?

And why, after twenty years, had he chosen to strike now?

Did he know that the police were onto him?

Had he somehow learned that evidence had been found in the Musgrave cabin?

Or, more likely, had he read about Cynthia Hunt’s death in the damned newspaper, the first of a series on mysteries and deaths surrounding Lake Twilight, and decided to take care of any loose ends he’d left dangling twenty years ago?

Was Janet Collins’s death an attempt by Vargas to clean up his mess from two decades earlier?

Or was Rand barking up the wrong tree? Even in the wrong damned forest?

He had lots of questions and only a few half-baked answers.

Chelle had joined him in the garage and was staring at the victim. “Son of a bitch,” she whispered under her breath as she crouched down for a closer look at the bruised and battered face. She studied Janet’s hands. “No defensive wounds. No broken fingernails. She didn’t fight back.”

“He surprised her. Got the drop on her,” Rand surmised aloud. “She didn’t have a chance.”

“Vargas.” Chelle rocked back on her heels and glanced up at Rand.

“That’s my guess.”

“You think he knew she put in a call to you?”

“Don’t know.” But it was a good guess that Vargas killed her because of what she knew about him in the past.

He wondered if they’d kept in contact over the years and she’d let it slip that she’d made the call, that for some reason she’d decided to tell the police what she’d seen.

He wondered what that could have been and only hoped that the equipment they’d retrieved from the Musgrave cabin would tell the story that had now, with her death, been silenced.

As they waited for the ambulance and local police to arrive, Rand did a quick walk-through of the house. He was careful not to disturb anything but searching for any signs of forced entry or a struggle or anything he thought seemed the least bit out of the ordinary.

Nothing appeared out of place aside from the mess that was in her kid’s room, where an explosion of clothes, books, CDs, candy wrappers, and soda cans littered floor, desk, and unmade bed.

Posters of Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and Michael Jackson along with Joe Montana and Michael Jordan covered the walls.

This, he assumed, was probably the bedroom’s normal state.

The other two bedrooms were as neat as the rest of the house.

From what he could glean, it appeared as if Janet had been interrupted the night before. A bottle of wine and box of crackers were open on the kitchen counter and a recording on the television was on pause.

Chelle found damp laundry in the dryer, though the timer had run out.

Rand wondered if Janet had gone into the garage to check on the wash and stumbled in the dark when the lights wouldn’t snap on.

He checked.

And found that the circuit breaker had been tampered with.

All of which he told the local police when they, along with the emergency vehicles, arrived.

Janet Collins lived out of the Almsville Police Department’s jurisdiction, so as a fire truck and ambulance, lights flashing, filled the driveway, Rand filled Officers Fuller and Washington in on what he knew, then repeated everything when the homicide detectives arrived.

By that time a portion of the street had been cordoned off and yellow crime scene tape strung around the house. The medical examiner and crime scene team arrived while neighbors gathered in doorways, driveways, and even inching down the street.

The detective in charge was a heavy-set woman with short graying hair and eyes that didn’t seem to miss much. She introduced herself as Madge Hall and assured Rand and Chelle that she would take the investigation from that point forward but keep the Almsville department in the loop.

“Sad for the kids,” Chelle said once they were inside Rand’s Jeep again and he’d maneuvered through the knotted traffic clogging the neighborhood.

“Sad for everyone,” he agreed.

“We need to nail Vargas.”

“If he did it.”

“Even if he didn’t,” she said from the passenger seat as Rand adjusted his windshield wipers for the mist that was collecting on the glass. “But I’ll bet my next paycheck he’s behind it all.”

“Not gonna take that bet,” Rand said, thinking about Vargas.

All the evidence was pointing to his involvement.

Rand’s own father had said Vargas had been blackmailing Tom Hunt.

And Janet Collins had called in to report what she’d seen with Vargas on the night Chase Hunt disappeared.

He’d probably resurfaced because Cynthia Hunt’s death had resurrected interest in Chase’s disappearance.

Right now, Rand wasn’t certain.

But he sure as hell was going to find out.