A Killer Plot (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

exclaimed, “You can’t let them go out the front! The press will swarm all over them!”
    Rawlings raced after the Krauses without comment. While he was redirecting the shell-shocked couple to the back door, Olivia and Haviland settled in his office to wait for his return.
    “Coffee?” Rawlings placed a mug on the desk in front of Olivia. “Thank you for helping them avoid the media. They have enough to deal with without having microphones and cameras shoved into their faces.”
    As the chief sank into his chair, Olivia scrutinized him. With more than twenty years on Cook, Rawlings looked much the worse for wear than his junior officer. The skin on the chief’s face was gray tinged, his salt-and-pepper hair was plastered to his scalp, and coffee stains were sprinkled across the front of his shirt.
    “This is the miserable part of being a cop,” he said as he cupped his hands around his mug. “Times like these. I will see the hidden emotions and the private and often unpleasant faces of the people in this community. They’ll come in here over the course of the next twenty-four hours—drunk, cursing, elaborating, glory-seeking, and, like Roy and Annie back there, completely sucker-punched.” He pressed his palms against his eyes. “At least you’re a straight shooter, Olivia. Just having you sitting across from me allows me a moment to breathe.”
    Olivia was surprised to find the restlessness she’d felt in Cook’s presence had passed now that she was with Rawlings.
    I feel so at ease with this man , she thought once again and was looking forward to the time when he would join the writer’s group, not as the chief of police, but as another writer. And as a friend.
    Aloud, she quipped, “I suppose you had several volunteers willing to perform the lethal injection.”
    Rawlings looked pained. “Half the town would prefer to bypass the court system entirely. As a society, we’re never as far away from lynch mobs as we’d like to think.”
    He took a sip of his coffee and then caught a drip from the side of the cup with the tip of his finger and licked it away with a flicker of his tongue.
    “How did this whole mess begin ... Sawyer?” Olivia tried out the chief’s given name. “How did Atlas become so estranged from his daughter?”
    Picking up a thick case file from the surface of his desk, Rawlings smoothed the cover and shook his head, his eyes sorrowful. “Mr. Kraus was always going to lose his wife. Jessie Kraus had wanted to leave Atlas early on in their marriage. He’d roughed her up a bit over the years—not enough to create a paper trail, but enough to force her to tread carefully when she finally decided to divorce him.”
    “And her maiden name was St. Claire?” Olivia surmised.
    Rawlings nodded. “Well, she and Heidi moved out of their house one night while Atlas was at his favorite watering hole. The divorce papers were served early the next morning. Atlas tracked his wife and daughter from Iowa to Pasadena, California, where Jessie and Heidi had relocated to live with Jessie’s new man.”
    “I can only imagine what happened when he found them,” Olivia stated anxiously.
    “Luckily, Heidi was at school when her father showed up. Jessie’s fiance was at work, but she was home. Her new guy was a structural engineer, so she didn’t need to hold down a job anymore and she was happily folding laundry when her ex-husband arrived. By the time Atlas was done with her, she was so bruised and broken I couldn’t recognize her in the photos. She had ... imprints from the iron on her back and stomach.”
    Olivia shuddered. “Why wasn’t he arrested?”
    “He disappeared. Fled the state. He then picked up construction jobs, the kind involving hard labor. The kind where the bosses don’t ask too many questions. Atlas told me he’d routinely return to Pasadena between jobs in order to see what kind of woman Heidi was becoming. He even watched a few of her school plays, hiding in the back row with a hat pulled down over his brow. He told me he knew after the first play that she’d take Hollywood by storm. Looks like he was right.”
    “Was it merely a coincidence that his brother-in-law lived in the same town where the Talbots owned a beach house?” Olivia asked in astonishment.
    “Not quite. Roy never knew the specifics regarding Atlas’s familial strife and while his younger brother kept in contact over the years, their conversations were brief and sporadic. When Roy was