Vultures at Twilight Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Charles Atkins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Recent Titles by Charles Atkins

  THE CADAVER’S BALL

  THE PORTRAIT

  RISK FACTOR

  ASHES ASHES *

  MOTHER’S MILK *

  * available from Severn House

  VULTURES AT TWILIGHT

  Charles Atkins

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2012

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2012 by Charles Atkins.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Atkins, Charles.

  Vultures at twilight.

  1. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-220-7 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8141-0 (cased)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Ida, Sue and Barbara

  Prologue

  Philip Conroy’s dying thought was: it’s a beautiful day. In truth, it was the kind of fall afternoon that brought leaf peepers and antique hunters in late-model Mercedes and convertible BMWs to picturesque Grenville where Philip – thirty-six, blond and movie-star handsome – had lived his entire life. Lying face up on a bed of freshly fallen leaves, with a bullet wound like a Hindu bindi mark in the middle of his forehead, the last images that shot through his blue-green eyes and into his brain were of a blazing red maple, surrounded by a sea of yellow ash. A breeze swept the deep ravine, and a fresh wave of leaves lost hold of their branches and danced on the currents. Philip’s last sounds were the running water of the Nillewaug River, where he had swum and fished as a child, and the crunching of twigs underfoot. He heard something dull and metallic, but was fully dead by the time the hundred-year-old iron metal snips wrapped around the finger next to the one where he wore Tolliver’s gold wedding band. He did not hear the single grunt as his murderer brought the handles of the heavy tool together and severed the finger or the clicking open of a Ziploc bag into which the digit was dropped.

  The nerve fibers just beneath his skin registered the bracing cold of the river as he was rolled into the lapping waters. The pores of his skin clamped shut for a final time, trying in vain to preserve body heat, not yet understanding that this natural response would no longer be necessary.

  As Philip Conroy’s body eventually came to rest wedged between an outcropping of rock and the twisted branches of an active beaver lodge, two miles due west auctioneer, Carl McElroy, cursed under his breath. His meaty arms tugged at the bottom drawer of the antique dresser; this is not what he needed in front of a packed house. The tow-headed owner of The Maple Leaf Auction knew that the secret drawer, a standard feature on Empire furniture, had been hopelessly jammed by the clumsy hands of five hundred previewers.

  With a forceful yank, it gave; the drawer skidded across the stage and its old-lady contents – bobbins, buttons, decades-old coupons – spilled, flew and rolled toward the front row of Friday night regulars.

  ‘Knew I’d get it open,’ Carl quipped, while shielding his fingers from the audience as they pressed back a two-inch hunk of badly cracked crotch-mahogany veneer. As he tried to restore order, and a semblance of his dignity, a murmur spread through the standing-room-only auction that was filled with dealers, townies and avid collectors of nineteenth- and early eighteenth-century furnishings.

  The focus had shifted to Mildred Potts in her usual front-row seat. The teased-blonde owner of Aunt Millie’s Attic picked anxiously at the folds of her voluminous red-and-white striped skirt where something had just landed. ‘What is it? Get it off of me!’ Her efforts impaired by the excited yapping and squirming of her white Shih Tzu, Taffy, who wore a bow that matched Mildred’s dress. The little dog’s tail twitched frantically and rapid snuffling noises emanated from her snout as she tried to free herself from Mildred, her focus riveted on what had landed in her mistress’ dress.

  Mildred shrieked, her rhinestone-crusted glasses fell, her aren’t they-darling? dog earrings whipped back and forth, and her face contorted as she batted at her dress, while struggling to control Taffy. ‘Get it off of me!’

  Taffy yapped and Mildred, unable to rid herself of whatever had landed in her lap, pushed back in her folding metal chair.

  ‘Get it off of me!’ The rubber-tipped legs of her chair squeaked on the waxed wide-board floor.

  Behind her the town’s dentist – an avid collector of colonial-era firearms – and a pair of newlyweds in search of the ‘perfect’ Hepplewhite dining table, tried to clear a path.

  ‘Mildred, Watch it!’ Gustav Auchinstrasse, the morbidly obese proprietor of Eighteenth-Century Antiques, yelled as his doughy hands hung on to a tenuously perched soda and sausage-and-pepper hoagie.

  He was too slow. With a piercing shriek, Mildred’s legs kicked out, sending her chair toppling back. As she did, an unidentified object flew from her skirt and landed in the shadows beneath the stage. Fortunately for Mildred, rather than crack her head on the hardwood floor, she landed in the ample lap of Mister Auchinstrasse and his warm sausage sandwich and icy cream soda, which now dribbled down the side of her face.

  While extricating herself from Gustav – who she considered an uncouth and opportunistic pig – Taffy leapt from her arm, and with more energy than she had shown in five years of life, tore beneath the stage.
/>   As Mildred picked bits of meat and sauce from her over-processed hair, Auctioneer McElroy tried to resume the auction, while keeping his simmering anger in control. ‘I don’t know what that was all about, but we’ve got over three hundred lots of fresh goods to get through. And time is money . . . All right, then, everyone back to normal?’ he asked, waving his hands and trying to make light of the situation. He looked at the red-faced Gustav, and hoped he wasn’t too upset to spend the copious amounts of money that he was known to. ‘Let’s get down to business.’

  The audience attempted to oblige, when, from beneath the stage, high-pitched yaps and growls emanated.

  ‘Taffy!’ Mildred called out as she retrieved her retro-look glasses. ‘Come to Mommy, Taffy.’

  The yips accelerated.

  ‘Come on, girl.’ Mildred looked around anxiously. ‘Why won’t she come? Taffy, come to Mommy.’ Mildred got down on all fours. ‘Come on girl. Come on. Are you stuck? Come to Mommy.’

  McElroy muttered, while plastering a good-humored smile. He hated that dog, and right now she was costing him money.

  ‘Come on, girl,’ Mildred pleaded. ‘Come on, sweetie.’

  Carl had had enough. He stomped his booted foot on the wooden stage.

  The dog shrieked and with a flash of fluffy white, Taffy reappeared at the far end of the stage.

  ‘Taffy!’ Mildred called, getting to her feet and throwing out her arms. ‘Come to Mommy.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ the dealer closest to the dog backed away. With eyes wide and finger pointing, he exclaimed. ‘She’s got something in her mouth!’

  Mildred misheard and thought there was something wrong with Taffy’s mouth. She raced toward the Shih Tzu; she stopped.

  Silence spread as mistress and dog faced off. The dealers in the front row pushed back, trying to create space between themselves and the snarling dog. Because there, tightly clenched between the bared and bloodstained teeth of little Taffy, was something made of flesh: human flesh.

  To those who would later be questioned by the female detective from the State’s Major Crime Squad, it seemed as if time stood still. In reality, it was only a couple of seconds before Mildred found her voice, and, to the horror of the assembled, made the obvious connection – and with an unfortunate choice of words.

  ‘Oh my, God! It’s a finger! Taffy, give Mommy the finger.’

  ONE

  ‘Lil, this makes three funerals in three months; it’s too much,’ Ada whispered, while pretending to listen to the graying minister of Grenville’s First Episcopalian’s rambling eulogy.

  Ada Strauss is my best friend, but at sixty-two, and after decades spent in noisy manufacturing warehouses, her hearing has slipped, and she refuses to wear hearing aids. So what she thought discreet was overheard two pews in front of us. I squeezed her hand and said, ‘They’re dropping like flies.’

  ‘Evie was lucky,’ Ada persisted, looking like a gift from Tiffany’s in a trim new robin’s egg pantsuit, with fiery opal beads around her neck and dangling from her ears. ‘Massive coronary in her sleep . . . Kind of like winning the death lotto.’

  ‘Sssshh!’ The black-suited woman directly in front of me shot Ada a pinched look.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ada responded, ‘I’m a little hard of hearing.’

  The woman shook her head and returned to the homily. I’d heard enough of these to realize that the minister’s effort was sub par, a string of platitudes in predictable sequences. He said a lot that was nice, but it didn’t get to the heart of who our friend, Evie, had been. More than that, it sounded like the one he’d given at Herb Neville’s two months back.

  ‘So who’s next?’ Ada whispered. ‘I’d like to go a month without a funeral. It’s not too much to ask, is it? And haven’t we heard this eulogy before?’

  The shoulders tensed on the woman in front of us; I silently dared her to say something. Who was she? I took in the cut of her suit, custom tailored, black like mine. I glanced at Ada, still not used to her ultra-short and spiky silver hair. She’d been a bottle redhead up until last Thursday. ‘Too much bother, Lil,’ she’d said as we’d sat in adjoining chairs at Lucy’s Salon. ‘I like the way you just need to get your ends trimmed a couple times a year; this has got to go.’ The beautician had already mixed the dye for her monthly touch up and Ada had waved her away. ‘No,’ she’d said, ‘take it down to the roots; I want to see what’s under there.’ The change had been dramatic; instead of making her look older, it was surprisingly chic, and made it hard not to notice the incredible blue of her eyes, and wonderfully sculpted shape of her face and still-tight chin and jaw, like a lovely pixie. And not for the first time, I had to wonder: why was I thinking these things?

  Ada caught me looking and smiled, she leaned up and whispered, ‘This is the first time I’ve seen Evie’s family in the flesh.’

  ‘I know.’ My voice caught in my throat, relieved that she couldn’t possibly know what I’d been thinking about, and not sure myself what these growing feelings toward my friend were all about. Not wanting to think it, but what popped to mind – Lil, you’ve got a crush. Stop it! Focus, what was she saying? Something about Evie’s family. I nodded toward the tensed-up woman in front of us. ‘I kind of recognize her from some of Evie’s pictures.’ And it just struck me as sad. Lots of family who never visited, never wrote or helped with Evie’s medicines or her cooking or her checkbook or her taxes, which she obsessed about endlessly as her mind drifted into Alzheimer’s, losing pieces of herself with each passing day.

  Ada was right; Evie – who was a good twenty years older than us, but who I’d known my entire life – had been lucky. Death was preferable. A chill shivered down my back. But lately, and certainly not helped by the horror of last night’s auction, where a severed finger was discovered in a dresser drawer, I couldn’t stop thinking about death . . . my death. Not that I’m in bad shape for fifty-nine. Aside from a couple teeth, my tonsils, and my uterus, Lillian Campbell still had her original parts. But sitting on the wooden pew, dressed in black and pearls, my still-natural blonde, albeit with a fair amount of silver, braided and up, and looking every bit Doctor Campbell’s widow, death was on my mind. Not that I’m afraid of it; in fact I’ve always had a certain relationship with death – it’s not a bad thing, just a part of things. Even now, it wasn’t death that frightened me as I again pictured the bloody finger clenched between the pointy teeth of Mildred Potts’ lapdog, but how it could come. Fingers don’t just fall off and get stuffed into drawers. What should have been a fun night’s entertainment had turned into something long and gruesome as Ada and I, along with over a hundred auction goers, had given brief statements to the local police before being allowed to leave. And now, less than twelve hours later, here I was at the funeral of a dear friend. It was too much, something evil had happened, and close to home; it frightened the hell out of me.

  As the minister droned on about family and community, I stretched my neck and snuck a look at the assembled. It was easy spotting the players; Ada and I were experts.

  As if reading my thoughts, she tilted her adorable chin toward me and whispered, ‘Those are her sons . . . Which one is the alcoholic?’

  The woman in front pretended not to hear; I wasn’t about to let her spoil one of our games. I carefully considered Ada’s question, while studying the profiles of the three dark-suited men in the right-front pew. They had all come from out of state – two from New York and one from California. As I recalled, from many conversations with Evie, it was the latter who had bounced in and out of three marriages and at least as many drug-rehabilitation programs. ‘The tan one,’ I offered, having made my selection.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Ada agreed. ‘He has fleshy ears.’

  ‘I thought that meant a bad heart,’ I said, trying to remember what Ada had told me about her latest medical prognostic tool: earlobe signs.

  ‘No, that’s a creased lobe. They’re very different. Although, he seems to have both.’

  The wom
an in front turned. ‘That’s it,’ she hissed between clenched nicotine-stained teeth. ‘You two have no respect for the dead.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ I stared her dead on. ‘We were both good friends of Evie . . . I can’t recall ever having met you.’

  She seemed taken aback. She squinted, appearing strangely constipated, was about to speak, and then turned away as Minister Ingram encouraged us to rise for a rousing, yet waspish, round of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

  As the service ended, Ada and I held back. We watched the mourners file past.

  ‘Cemetery?’ she asked.

  I glanced to see she had worn appropriate shoes, as had I. This had been the rainiest year on record for Connecticut, where our normally dry fall had seen torrential downpours at least two or three times a week. The ground was marshy and it wreaked havoc on footwear. So while I had a closet of shoes – and isn’t it funny how so many memories can be tied up in a pair of Ferragamo pumps or cork-soled mules, bought impulsively in St Martin’s on one of the few vacations my Bradley had agreed to take? – now, we both wore sensible rubber-soled walking shoes; mine black, hers dyed-to-match blue.

  We watched as Evie’s sons exited. I couldn’t say why, but something about them piqued my curiosity. I wanted to see more, to know why none of them had called or spent time with their mother in the last years of her life. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, waiting for a break in the mourners and then stepping into the aisle. I made room for Ada, who at barely five feet is a head shorter than me. As I stood, I overheard the hushed conversation of the woman who had been in front of us.

  ‘She promised me that ring,’ she said to her companion.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but that was when you were still her daughter-in-law.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘Carla, if it’s not in the will, you won’t get it.’