Within A Shadowed Forest: A Watefront Mystery Featuring Martha Whitaker (Waterfront Mystery Series Book 2) by Jeffrey D. Briggs

Within A Shadowed Forest: A Watefront Mystery Featuring Martha Whitaker (Waterfront Mystery Series Book 2) by Jeffrey D. Briggs

Author:Jeffrey D. Briggs [Briggs, Jeffrey D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Water's End Press
Published: 2020-07-21T16:00:00+00:00


Sixteen

M acAuliffe leaned against the doorjamb as he watched and listened to the two women talk. Martha was on edge, her taut body and tight voice communicating an underlying intensity that Berglund wasn’t picking up on as she rocked the baby nestled against her chest. Someone had tried to kill her mere hours ago. Finding Amelia’s killer had now become personal for Martha, as well. It was one thing to take out an unsuspecting couple of reporters, as she had done to him and Lance on the Lake Union houseboat, but MacAuliffe had sat through the trials and heard the stories of what had happened in Utah before Martha returned home to take down an armed police officer, leaving him with a broken jaw, ruined knee, and pinned to the floor with a nail gun.

Who better to see through the tricks of a murderer than someone who already knew all the tricks? He studied Martha with fresh eyes.

MacAuliffe made some noise as he entered the room. “I’ve been wondering if something else might be going on, as well.”

“Like what?” Berglund asked, turning to face him. She held a notebook in hands that were lean and sinewy from a lifetime of work spent in the woods of northern Minnesota. Her deep brown eyes held him.

“Well, I’ve been searching Amelia’s room. Gould told us they found some drugs—most likely fentanyl and a stash of marijuana—in her undies drawer. Not a particularly good hiding place—unless you want to ensure someone’s going to find it. But I’m puzzled by what we’re not finding, or at least what we’re not seeing. There’s nothing that might explain or even hint at why someone killed the Bumgartens and decided to attack Martha. Amelia’s room is too neat and tidy. Where’re her schoolbooks, her homework? There’s no sheets of music for the avid violin player, no scripts to read for the theatre student. Nothing that screams here was the life of an active and engaged high school junior. Nothing. The police wouldn’t have confiscated all of it and tidied the room up behind them. So where are the missing pieces?”

“Wonderful powers of observation, Sherlock,” Berglund said. “But how does that tell us anything about what happened to Amy or her mom?”

“I don’t know,” MacAuliffe said. “When I talked with Ingrid Johnssen at the North House Folk School, she complained Amelia spent more time doing homework than restocking shelves. She had to have her schoolwork with her to do that. But Monahan told us there was nothing in the truck besides her body and her cell phone. He said everything leaves some residue. A nylon backpack would’ve melted but it would’ve left some residue.”

“That missing backpack’s still bothering you,” Martha said.

“Yeah. It only makes sense that if Rose told Amelia to run if anything happened to her and said that her father would know what to do, she had to be taking some kind of information to him. It had to be in that backpack. She didn’t go home to change clothes or even pick up her toothbrush.



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