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  PPEAK SEASON FOR MURDER

  A LEIGH GIRARD MYSTERY

  PPEAK SEASON FOR MURDER

  GAIL LUKASIK

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  Copyright © 2013 by Gail Lukasik

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lukasik, Gail.

  Peak season for murder : a Leigh Girard mystery / Gail Lukasik. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2729-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1-4328-2729-4 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2903-2 eISBN-10: 1-4328-2903-3

  1. Actresses—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.U385P43 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2013014019

  First Edition. First Printing: September 2013

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2903-2 ISBN-10: 1-4328-2903-3

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  Visit our website– http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 17 16 15 14 13

  To Jerry for his unwavering encouragement

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Scott Gimboe, author, crime scene investigator and traffic reconstructionist. A special thanks to Jean Weeg for being the best reader a writer could ask for.

  PROLOGUE: TWENTY-FOUR YEARS EARLIER

  The woman stood over her sleeping lover, watching the gentle rise and fall of his naked chest, listening to his breathing. In her right hand, she held the pistol, the one he’d given her for protection.

  “Mostly from me,” he’d joked.

  Small, compact with an ivory handle, she could cradle it in the palm of her hand, carry it in her jacket pocket, hide it in her purse, and no one would see it.

  She raised her right hand and aimed the gun at his temple.

  How easy it would be to kill him, she thought. And no one could blame me.

  As if he sensed her, he took a deep breath and let out a soft snore, then settled back to sleep.

  On his left hand she could see the glint of his gold wedding band.

  “You knew what we were about. I never lied to you,” had been his explanation.

  Was I that weak, she wondered? No, he was that strong.

  Suddenly, lightning flashed against the window, lighting up the room for a second as if illuminating her weakness—his perfect face.

  She pulled back on the trigger thinking how easily she could destroy it.

  A clap of thunder crashed overhead.

  Had his eyes flickered open for a brief second? she thought, holding her breath. But it was just an illusion; he went on softly snoring, oblivious as always, wrapped up in his own dreams.

  No, she told herself as she eased up on the trigger.

  She took one more look at him before she crept out of the bedroom.

  As she stood in the living room, she was tempted to take something, some reminder of this time. But she knew she had to make it look right.

  She put the pistol back in the desk drawer.

  Quietly, she opened the front door, locking it behind her, as if she had never been there, as if she had never let him into her life.

  Her car was parked in front of the apartment building. But she walked past it into the dark, wet night, the rain soaking through her t-shirt and jeans. She congratulated herself on two things: her cleverness in staging her own disappearance and her restraint in not killing him—the man who had ruined her.

  After all, she thought to herself, as she headed toward the highway, murder was never part of the plan. I simply want to disappear forever.

  CHAPTER ONE: PRESENT DAY, SUNDAY, JULY 9

  “Didn’t mean to scare you, Leigh,” Ken Albright said, his eyes scanning the woods. “But I can’t be too careful, now.”

  The now hung in the air like the blistering heat and humidity. Ken lowered the aluminum bat, and with it his powerful shoulders sagged. He seemed to shrink into himself as if something were eating him from the inside.

  “Next time say something, before you jump out at me with that bat.” I bent over and gathered up the spilled contents of my shoulder bag, my hands shaking.

  He’d left me a cryptic voice message around six this morning that had propelled me to Marshalls Point, where he and Brownie Lawrence lived in a dilapidated shack off North Bay.

  “Brownie’s dead. I gotta show you where I found him. It isn’t right. You come today.” Ken’s words were clipped with rage, and I was afraid for him. Only one person could keep Ken’s anger in check, and that person was dead.

  “Yeah, well, c’mon,” Ken demanded. That was the closest to an apology I was going to get.

  He walked past me, and I caught a peculiar odor of sweat and sweetness like musky rotting fruit. I knew hygiene was a problem for the men and that on warm days they bathed in the bay. Winters they hitchhiked to the YMCA in Fish Creek.

  I dusted the sandy soil off my bag, slung it over my shoulder and hurried behind him. I’d been blundering down the path looking for the three stones that marked the hidden entrance to the men’s shack when he’d jumped out at me holding the bat like a weapon.

  As I walked, I studied his clothes: cut-off jeans and a white muscle shirt. White strings hung from the jeans, and his t-shirt was yellow around the armpits. The gnats and black flies, which kept circling me, didn’t seem to bother him. A black fly was perched atop his shaved head.

  When we came to the scarred pine, Ken moved left, pushed back a tangle of dense shrubs and then disappeared into the forest. He must have removed the three stones. No wonder I couldn’t find the entrance.

  I scurried after him, stumbling through the heavy green undergrowth and tall, ancient trees, wondering if it was fear or anger that had made him remove the stone markers.

  We walked in silence until the woods opened into a clearing. There stood the ramshackle house the two formerly homeless men had built a few feet from the bay. Like their lives, the house had been pieced together from what was at hand—plywood, tarp and tin. How they lived there in the winter was beyond me. But I knew it was better than living on the streets.

  “We got windows now.” Ken pointed toward two windows on the front of the house, which caught the sun in a shimmering blaze. “Salvaged them from an abandoned barn down the road.”

  “How did you get them here?” I knew he was slowly leading up to what he wanted to show me, Brownie’s last resting place, and I wasn’t going to push h
im. Always touchy, Ken now gave off the vibe of a wounded animal.

  “Carried them.” Ken walked away abruptly, still toting the bat. When he came to a gnarled cherry tree beside the house, he stopped. “That’s it. That’s where I found him when I got back from my sister’s yesterday.”

  I stared at the indentation in the grassy weeds—a yellowed outline where Brownie’s body had lain exposed to the elements.

  Dark pellets of dry and rotting fruit were scattered under the tree and crushed where Brownie’s body had been. I took a step closer and was assaulted with the rank odor of decay. I put my hand over my nose. There was a clumped stain that looked like dried blood. Though it could be crushed fruit. It was hard to tell. And I wasn’t about to poke around in it.

  “I should have never gone to see my sister in Green Bay.” Ken scratched the back of his neck. “I coulda gotten him to a doctor. Maybe saved him. He didn’t deserve to lie out here like a dog for days, rotting. The damn insects had already gotten to him.”

  “Do you know how he died?” I asked, still staring at the clumped stain. “That looks like blood.”

  “How would I know? I wasn’t here. Maybe Brownie hit his head or something. Maybe you could find out.” It wasn’t a question. “The police kept asking me stuff like were we getting along, where was I, that kind of thing. I wanted to bust them one. But I kept looking at Brownie lying there on his back with his eyes open, and I could hear him saying to me, ‘Take it easy, Kenny. Just let it go. You know what happens when you get mad.’ So I held my temper.”

  The last time I’d seen Brownie, he was strumming his beat-up guitar and singing, “Take It Easy,” at the beach party celebrating the bequeath of land to him and Ken by the Door Conservancy. That was two weeks ago.

  “I’ll give Deputy Jorgensen a call and see what I can find out for you.” I wondered if the police suspected foul play or were just being thorough.

  Ken looked off toward the water. I could see the glisten of tears in his eyes. “But I fixed them cops all right.”

  I waited for him to tell me why he’d really called me from the marina in Sister Bay this morning.

  “I cleaned things up before the cops got here. I didn’t touch Brownie’s body, but I got rid of the empty wine bottles. I didn’t want them to think that of Brownie.”

  “You found wine bottles?” Brownie had been a frail man, thin and lean-boned, who, until meeting Ken, had been a hopeless alcoholic living in shelters and on the streets of Green Bay. Ken’s fall from grace had been sudden: a job loss, divorce, alcohol, drugs and a monumental temper that kept him from holding a job.

  “Yeah, right next to him in the grass.”

  “Where are they? Did the police take them?”

  He smiled slyly. “Nope. I busted those bottles up.” He lifted the bat overhead and slammed it on the ground twice. “Then I pitched the damn pieces in the bay. I was so mad.”

  “You should have left the bottles, Ken,” I reprimanded him, my eyes focused on the bat. His erratic behavior had me on edge.

  “Those weren’t Brownie’s. He wouldn’t have bought bottles of wine. Someone gave them to him.”

  It was obvious Ken was in complete denial about Brownie falling off the wagon. “That wasn’t up to you to decide. Did you tell the police about them?”

  “What did I just say? I don’t want them thinking that about Brownie. Someone gave him that wine.”

  I wasn’t about to point out that even if someone gave him the wine, no one made him drink it. But I was curious why he believed Brownie wouldn’t have bought wine. “Why are you so sure he didn’t buy the wine?”

  He ran his hand back and forth over his shaved head. “You have to know alcoholics. They always favor one type of drink. If Brownie had started drinking again, it woulda been bourbon, Old Kentucky bourbon. That’s what he liked to drink. And before I smashed the bottles up, I looked at the label. It was that sweet cherry wine they sell all over the peninsula.”

  “But maybe he bought the cherry wine because it was cheap and easy to get?” I countered.

  He stepped close to me, forcing me to step back. “I’m telling you. I know Brownie. He’d a never bought them. We used to talk sometime about if we started drinking again what we’d buy. And he always said bourbon. There’s no way he’d drink sweet cherry wine, I’m telling you.”

  I stepped around him and knelt down near the spot where Brownie had died, holding one hand over my nose to block the stench.

  Carefully I ran my hands through the tall grass, making wider and wider circles. Just behind the tree something sharp pricked my finger. I drew back my hand. A small bead of blood swelled on my index finger. I sucked at the blood and leaned in closer to see what pricked my finger. Something red glinted in the grass. I picked it up. It was a dark red shard of glass.

  “Were the bottles this color?” I held the shard out to him.

  “Yeah, that looks like it.” He reached for it but I pulled my hand back.

  “Mind if I hang on to it?”

  “Just get it outta here. I don’t need reminders.”

  I turned over the shard, looking for any kind of mark. But there was none. “Do you remember the name on the label?” I asked, standing up.

  He tugged at his shirt as if it were constricting him. “Bunch of cherries. That’s all I remember. What’s it matter now, anyway?”

  “Probably doesn’t,” I slipped the shard into my pants’ pocket.

  “Forget about those damn wine bottles. You gotta do something for me and Brownie. You gotta find Brownie’s family. ’Cause I want them to know how he turned his life around. There ought to be an article in it for you.”

  “Okay, what can you tell me about them?” Even as I asked the question, I knew I was stepping into forbidden territory. While Jake Stevens, the Door County Gazette editor, and I had been bedmates, he’d indulged my forays into investigative reporting, finding them oddly stimulating. Now he found them irritating and counterproductive, or maybe it was me he found irritating and counterproductive.

  “Get the story, that’s it,” he’d barked at me last week. Of course, that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull as far as I was concerned.

  “He never talked about them except to say that they were dead to him. And now he’s dead.” He moved the bat off his shoulder and let it hang by his side.

  “And he never said anything else?”

  Ken hunched his broad shoulders and looked away. He was holding something back. “C’mon, Ken. I’ll need something to go on if you want me to find his family.”

  He turned away and walked toward the house. I followed him.

  The house smelled of dampness and old fires from the Franklin stove in the corner of the one-room dwelling. There were two sleeping bags on either side of the room, one table and two mismatched chairs in the middle. Along the walls were shelves with dishes, books and clothes on them. And leaning against one of the cots was Brownie’s guitar.

  An image of Brownie putting his hand over his mouth when he smiled, as if he were protecting you from his toothless state, sprung to mind.

  “In that article about us getting the land, you make sure you say we’re addressless, not homeless,” Brownie had insisted.

  I shook my head, not wanting to feel the sadness rushing in. Of the two men, Brownie was the more likeable, even putting Ken’s erratic rage aside. From the beginning, I’d felt a kinship with Brownie, nothing I could put my finger on, just that feeling you get when you click with someone. Under different circumstances we might have been friends.

  “Sit down,” Ken demanded, resting the bat against his chair. Then he retrieved a metal box from a high shelf, put it on the table and opened it.

  “Here, these were Brownie’s.” He handed me two silver dog tags. There was something sticky on the edges of both tags. “Since now you got his name, you can find his people.”

  I looked down at the beat-up tags. “Browning, Lawrence, M., social security number, AB positive, Roman Ca
tholic.” It was a start.

  All Brownie would tell me was his age, 66, that he’d been on the streets a long time, and that he was a vet. Doing the math, I figured out he was a Vietnam vet. Probably the war had shattered his life. Now the dented dog tags proved I’d been right on all counts.

  “Lawrence Browning,” I repeated. “Why’d he switch his first and last name?”

  “What difference does it make?” Ken said angrily, his face a nasty shade of red. Up close I noticed his brown goatee was shaggy and a faint outline of hair had sprouted on his normally shaved head.

  “Anything else?” I coaxed, keeping my irritation in check. Ken’s street wariness was like a wall that kept him safe, but from good intentions as well as bad. He’d lost all ability to detect the difference.

  He shook his head no, but I sensed he was lying.

  “Okay,” I said, getting up to leave. “I’ll see what I can find out.” I shoved the dog tags in my bag and walked outside, pausing to look at the water glittering in the morning sun, alive with so much life.

  “I guess I’m going to have to finish it myself.” Ken gestured toward the half-finished pier.

  “You can do it,” I said, hoping he caught my meaning.

  “Do you think them rich people are going to kick me off the land, now that Brownie’s gone? I got nowhere else to go.”

  “The homeowners’ association doesn’t own your land, the conservancy does. But it couldn’t hurt to call Mike Roberts at the conservancy and make sure.”

  Ken might have reason to be worried. The land had been bequeathed to both Brownie and him by the Door County Conservancy in perpetuity. With Brownie’s death, maybe the homeowners’ association could force Ken off the land. But why would they? They hadn’t objected to the original bequest. The majority of the pricey exclusive homes were vacant most of the year, except for the occasional week or two in July, peak season in Door County.

  “If only Brownie hadn’t died.” Ken shook his head sadly. “Everything was going so good.”