Blood Lies Read online

  Blood Lies

  “Lies” Mystery Series #5

  By Andrew Cunningham

  Copyright © 2020 Andrew Cunningham

  All Rights Reserved

  Books by Andrew Cunningham

  Thrillers

  Wisdom Spring

  Deadly Shore

  “Lies” Mystery Series

  All Lies

  Fatal Lies

  Vegas Lies

  Secrets & Lies

  Blood Lies

  Eden Rising Post-Apocalyptic Series

  Eden Rising

  Eden Lost

  Eden's Legacy

  Arthur Macarthur Series of Children's Mysteries (as A.R. Cunningham)

  The Mysterious Stranger

  The Ghost Car

  The Creeping Sludge

  The Sky Prisoner

  The Ride of Doom

  To Charlotte … forever

  Also, to the real Tom Henderson. My brother, my friend,

  and the guy with the biggest heart I know.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  Read the award-winning Amazon bestseller, WISDOM SPRING

  Chapter 1

  The bullet missed me by inches.

  Unfortunately, it caught Sabrina by those same inches. I heard a grunt and I turned to shield her, but her legs had buckled and she was falling to the ground. I reached out just as her head connected with the pavement with a sickening crack.

  I fell on her in my attempt to protect her. I was way too late, but I didn’t want to move. Then I heard a car peel out. I stayed on top of her for a moment longer, just to be sure they were gone, then I checked on her. She wasn’t moving. And there was blood, lots of it. There was a growing red spot on her side. The bullet wound. The worst of the blood, however, was pooled around her head. I froze. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

  I shook her, but she didn’t move. I put my head down by her face. She was breathing! I looked around in panic. People were running up to help.

  “Someone call 9-1-1 ... please.” I was crying.

  What had just happened?

  *****

  It took forever for the police and EMS to arrive. They were actually there in minutes. But to me it was forever. I was still trying to wake Sabrina, while at the same time attempting to stop the blood gushing from her head. That seemed the most critical wound. I suppose it wasn’t really gushing, but it just showed my state of mind. To me it was the worst-case scenario. Sabrina was dying and I couldn’t do anything about it.

  The paramedics pushed me out of the way and started to attend to Sabrina. I moved in close and they pushed me again, harder this time. I landed on my butt with a thud and just sat there staring into space, tears streaming down my face.

  There was no one to console me. My two neighbors were gone. Mo, who lived on the first floor, was teaching her second graders that day, and Seymour was down in Florida. He wasn’t Seymour any longer. That was the name he had used in Witness Protection. His real name was Jack Davis. Now that he was safely out of Witness Protection, he lived in Florida and was probably skimming across the Everglades in his airboat at that very moment, oblivious to my panic.

  I looked up to find dozens of gawkers crowding around and staring at us, many with their cell phones out taking pictures or videos of the gruesome scene.

  Police cars were quickly arriving, and officers began pushing the onlookers away from us and hastily stringing crime scene tape.

  “Could I get your name?”

  I looked up through my tears to see a smallish black woman with sergeant stripes on her uniform. She looked vaguely familiar. I think she had come one other time when a shooting occurred at my house.

  “How’s Sabrina?” I asked in a hoarse voice. I tried to stand up, but the sergeant gently put her hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down.

  “Let the paramedics do their job.”

  “But I need to know…”

  One of the paramedics heard me. He turned and said, “She’s breathing and we have her stabilized. That’s all I can tell you right now. We’re going to put her in the ambulance now.”

  “I’m coming,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” said the sergeant. “You can go as soon as we’re done here, so the faster you answer my questions, the sooner you can go.”

  This was killing me.

  “Okay,” I said quietly, staring while they wheeled Sabrina over to the ambulance and lifted her in.

  “So again, what’s your name?”

  “Delmore Honeycutt.”

  I thought I saw the beginnings of a laugh.

  “Del for short.”

  Somehow that didn’t make her twitching mouth and cheek muscles disappear. She made me spell it, too, first name and last.

  Delmore Honeycutt. Most of the males in the long line of Honeycutts, from my father on back, were named Robert Bruce Honeycutt. When they felt daring, sometimes the parents named them Bruce Robert. When it was my turn, I think my mother put her foot down in protest. But Delmore? There were no Delmores on her side of the family, so all I could imagine was that she was drunk when she came up with the name.

  “Honeycutt.” A cop in a rumpled suit lifted the crime scene tape and ducked under, approaching us.

  Ugh. It was Detective Marsh. We’d had numerous dealings with him. He always felt we were concealing information from him. Sometimes we had been, but more often than not we were just clueless. This qualified as one of those times.

  “What’s the story this time?” he asked.

  “Sabrina’s been shot,” I said, my voice cracking.

  For the first time, I saw a look of genuine concern on his face. Sabrina had that effect on people.

  “I want to go to the hospital, but she won’t let me,” I said, pointing to the sergeant.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “You can tell me what’s going when we get to the hospital.”

  “I don’t know…” I began.

  “Yeah, yeah, you don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I’ve heard it before.”

  He told the sergeant the crime scene was hers, then loaded me into his car. He found out which hospital they were taking her to, and took off, siren screaming.

  Chapter 2

  “Are you involved in another of your ‘adventures?’” he asked as he drove.

  I could almost see the quotation marks around
“adventures.” He wasn’t wrong in his assumption. We seemed to have a habit of getting into dangerous situations. Sabrina was a world-famous mystery author and, since we met, we had become involved in some real-life mysteries. It wasn’t our fault. It just seemed that, together, we attracted danger.

  “Not at all,” I answered. I was trying hard to concentrate on his questions but kept flashing to the picture of Sabrina bleeding on the sidewalk. The fact that he was rocketing down the highway, weaving in and out of traffic, was kind of distracting as well. I was holding onto the seat for dear life. Marsh didn’t seem to notice.

  “Nothing?”

  “No. It’s been a really quiet time. I’ve been making notes of our last encounter and Sabrina has been finishing the new mystery she’s been writing. Most of our time has been spent indoors for the last couple of months. We haven’t had time to piss anyone off. In fact, we’ve been at our house in Western Mass this whole time. We just got to East Boston last night.”

  We alternated between my late father’s house in Northampton and my three-decker house in East Boston, where we occupied the third floor.

  “Has Sabrina received any death threats?” Marsh asked. “Famous people always seem to get them.”

  “Not one,” I said. “She’ll get the occasional ‘You’re a hack writer’ kind of letter or email, but nothing more serious than that.”

  “Anyone in the family of the husband she killed? Someone who might want revenge?”

  Oh yes. That was the other reason she was famous. People love dirt on celebrities, and her dirt was particularly appealing. When her secret past was revealed, it ramped up her celebrity status to the level of superstar. Sabrina had spent six years in prison for killing her abusive husband. She couldn’t prove the abuse, but luckily, she had a judge who believed her, and he gave her a relatively light sentence. When she was released, she changed her name to Sabrina Spencer, and between her skill as a writer and a few lucky early breaks, each of her books had landed on the bestseller lists for months at a time.

  “I think she said that her ex-husband had a couple of brothers. If they were anything like him, then yeah, someone might want revenge. But that was a long time ago.”

  “We’ll check them out anyway.”

  Marsh had to slow down to warp speed when we hit the traffic downtown, but my knuckles were still white. He had made such good time we almost beat the ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital. It had arrived only a few minutes before us.

  We jumped out of his car and bulled our way into the emergency room, Marsh and his badge running interference. There wasn’t much we could do, however, as they had already wheeled Sabrina into the bowels of the hospital for surgery. Marsh suggested that we go down to the cafeteria for coffee. I didn’t really want to, but it was going to do no good to sit in the emergency room. We had no idea how long the surgery would take. Marsh left his card with the intake people and told them that he was to be called the moment Sabrina was out of surgery.

  On our way to the cafeteria, Marsh noticed me limping.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Hurts,” I replied. “I’ve been trying not to put too much of a strain on it but running in here didn’t help.”

  Several months earlier, in an attempt to help Seymour/Jack find the people who were after him, I had ended up in a disagreement with an alligator in the Everglades. No need to ask who won. He’s probably still picking pieces of my thigh out of his teeth. I was in the hospital down there for a month, suffering through a couple of surgeries before I was allowed to return home. I had graduated from a wheelchair to crutches to a cane, which I had been using until a week ago. I had a pretty ugly scar and it still hurt most of the time.

  Marsh had been involved from the beginning, when Jack—then known as Seymour—had blown away someone outside his apartment. After that, Marsh stayed in touch with the various law enforcement agencies, keeping track of our progress. He actually called me when I was in the hospital in Miami. Maybe he had just gone through sensitivity training.

  I couldn’t get the image of Sabrina lying on the pavement out of my head. I had to call Mo and Jack. They would never forgive me if I didn’t call them. I figured I should also call Steve Rogers, Sabrina’s agent, lawyer, and all-around superhero. He could get anything done. I referred to him as Captain America, since Captain America’s alter-ego in the comic books was named Steve Rogers. I’d call him when I had a chance. Mo and Jack came first. I gingerly sat on a cafeteria chair while Marsh went for coffee. I had never seen him so nice. More than anything else, I think it showed the impact Sabrina had on others. It was hard not to love her.

  While he was getting the coffee, I left messages for both Mo and Jack, giving them as much information as I had. Marsh returned as I hung up from the call to Jack.

  “Come up with anything?” he asked. He was all business now.

  “Honestly, I can’t think of anyone who’d want to hurt her,” I commented. “As I said, we’ve been out of touch since we returned from Florida. I’ve been concentrating on healing, so we really haven’t gone anywhere. It’s why we’ve spent so much time catching up on work. I have trouble believing it was one of her ex-husband’s brothers, which leaves a stalking fan as the only explanation I can come up with.”

  “And she’s had no weird phone calls?”

  “She only answers her phone if it’s a number she recognizes, otherwise she makes me answer it. Nothing strange. Very few people even have the number. As for letters, she always gets marriage proposals, but there have been none that worried us. They all seem harmless.”

  “Did she keep them?” asked Marsh.

  “Yes, she files them in a folder labeled ‘Marriage Proposals.’ I think it’s there to let me know that there are other candidates out there in case I screw up as a boyfriend.” I tried to laugh, but it turned into tears.

  “She’ll be okay,” said Marsh. I thought he was going to hold my hand. I nodded through my tears. “What was the name of her ex?” he asked.

  I told him, then I gave him the name of the town in Pennsylvania where it happened.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’m going to check in with the police department there. Don’t move. I don’t want you wandering the hospital in your emotional state. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  When he left, I called Steve Rogers and filled him in. He asked me how I was doing. Nice guy. He told me not to worry about anything, that he’d take care of informing her publisher. He told me to call him if I needed anything. No wonder Sabrina liked him so much.

  As soon as I hung up, Mo called. I filled her in a little more, not that I knew much more than I had already told her on the voicemail. She said she was getting someone to watch her class and would be right over.

  When Marsh returned, he informed me that the hospital was crawling with reporters. Word had leaked out. I looked on my phone at the news outlets. Oh, they had picked up the news all right. Most of them were reporting that it was a deranged fan who had attacked her. Hey, if you don’t know, make it up.

  A cup of coffee became a burger and fries. Marsh, who was beginning to remind me of my mother, insisted that I eat something, even though I told him I wasn’t hungry. I ate more of it than I thought I would.

  Mo showed up an hour later. She gave me the hug that I had wished for back on the street and then shook Marsh’s hand. Then we all just sat there for another hour, not knowing what to do. Marsh had his people working on the case. He wanted to be there when Sabrina woke up. He needed to ask her questions. I think he just had a crush on her.

  Marsh’s phone rang at about 7:00. He said “okay” a few times and hung up.

  “She’s out of surgery.”

  Chapter 3

  We raced up to post-op. Well, they raced, I limped. When we got there the doctor met us in the hall and informed us that Sabrina hadn’t woken up yet, and that we couldn’t see her until they moved her to a room.

  “She might be out for a while,” he said. “
You can sit in there with her, but don’t expect much right away.”

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “The next twenty-four hours will give us a better idea. I’m more concerned with the trauma her head received when it hit the sidewalk than I am about the bullet wound. That was pretty routine. The bullet didn’t hit anything major.”

  “Was it still in there?” asked Marsh.

  “It was. We gave it to the other detective.”

  “What other detective?” asked Marsh.

  “He said you needed the bullet as soon as we had it out, so we gave it to him the minute we removed it.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “Yes, I wrote it down,” said the doctor. He looked in his notes. “Detective Bruno. John Bruno.”

  “We don’t have a Detective Bruno on the Boston Police force,” said Marsh. “Did he show you a badge?”

  “He did. Detective, I’ve done this hundreds of times. We remove the bullet and we hand it to the cop on duty. They bag it and take off, presumably to the lab. This didn’t seem any different from the other times.”

  “Excuse me,” said Marsh to no one in particular. “I’ve gotta make a phone call.” He left the room.

  Mo and I looked at each other. What just happened?

  They moved Sabrina to a private room fairly quickly. I made sure she had a single room. Once they realized who it was, expense didn’t become an issue with them. They assumed she could pay if the insurance wouldn’t. What they didn’t know was that since I was the co-author of the nonfiction books, I had become quite wealthy in my own right.

  Mo and I brought chairs over to the side of Sabrina’s bed. Just as we sat down, Mo’s phone rang.

  “It’s Jack. I’ll take it outside.”

  She left and I was alone with Sabrina. I took her hand and started talking to her. I don’t remember what I said, but I know that the words “I love you” were repeated many times. She was lying there so peacefully, her pale skin looking even paler under the muted lights in the room. I smoothed out her long red hair. She called it auburn, but it was red to me. I kissed her lightly on the lips. Maybe it would help her wake up. It worked in the fairy tales. However, this was no fairy tale. She just laid there, breathing softly.