A Luring Murder (16 page)

“What?”

I pointed through the glass enclosure to where a sliver of day light shone between the glass wall and the jamb of the door.

“The sliding door is open on the other side of the boat.”

“So?”

“Looks like someone broke in. The Kings could have been burglarized.”

“And I’m sure the King’s would want us to check it out. Right?”

I stepped onto the boat and extended a hand to Louise. “I’m positive they would want our help.”

“Very shaky, Catherine. Not enough to hold up in a court of law.”

“We’re not even here officially, Louise. We’re both on leave. We’re just going to close the sliding glass door and go back to our vacation plans. If we happen to see something incriminating.” I shrugged my shoulders and splayed my hands wide. “Then we’ll tell the sheriff.”

A smirk twisted her lips.

It was a flimsy excuse to get on the boat, but we’d come this far. Too far to not look around.

Patrick might appear charming and innocent, but we’d both encountered good actors in the course of our careers. It was usually the psychopaths of this world who were the most charming. A sociopath could smile in your face while they cut your throat. Then make and eat dinner while you bled to death on their kitchen floor, without the slightest hint of guilt.

I waved Louise forward. She finally relented and boarded the boat. A perimeter sweep showed nothing incriminating on the outside. No blood streaks where a body might have been dragged onto shore. Not even a fishing hook. The boat was beautifully clean considering it had sat out in the rain.

It had never occurred to me to snag a pair of latex gloves from Digs, so I used the bottom of my shirt to cover my finger, then push the door all the way open, and stepped inside.

In the corner was a small round cafe table with four ice cream parlor chairs and one adjustable stool. Covering the surface of the table was a light powdery substance.

“Louise, come here and look at this.”

She leaned over my shoulder. “What is it?”

“Not sure. Some kind of powder.”

“Looks more like a residue than a powder. Like someone tried to clean up whatever was on the table.”

“Cocaine?” I asked.

“Too brown.” She pulled a baggy from the back pocket of her pants, turned it inside out, and dabbed at the residue on the table. “Maybe I can get enough up for Digs to analyze.”

“Good thinking.”

The chemical odor seemed particularly strong on this side of the enclosure. I knelt down and ran my hand over the brown synthetic carpeting.

“The floor’s wet. Like it’s been cleaned.”

“It’s a boat, the floor’s bound to get wet.”

“I don’t think so.” I smelled the palm of my hand. “Can’t you smell the cleanser?”

“Not really.”

It figured. My olfactory senses were super sensitive. Gavin claimed I could smell a fart in a hurricane.

I pushed my hand down into the prickly pile until I reached the base of the plastic spikes and smelled my hand again.

“Nope. It’s definitely been cleaned. There’s cleanser all over the carpet. I don’t know much about boats. Maybe they clean the floors regularly, but I doubt it.”

“That doesn’t bode well for Patrick,” Louise said.

“No, it doesn’t.”

The wet patch stopped in a ten-inch circle. The area around the circle was desert dry. I crawled along the floor running my hand back and forth, until I hit another large wet spot near the door. Again, I pushed my hand into the plastic pile. Again, I smelled cleanser.

Louise’s shadow loomed over me. “What did you find?”

I craned my neck to look at her over my shoulder. “Come down here and feel this.”

“That would be a little difficult.” She patted her leg. “I can’t really crawl around on the floor.”

The needling barbs landed square on the mark.

“I’m not crawling around on the floor.” I gave her word air quotes with my fingers. “I’m investigating, there’s a difference.”

“Okay.” Louise grinned. She’s always taken a sick pleasure in our verbal jousts. “I can’t investigate on the floor like that.”

“Give me a tissue” I waved my fingers at her like a child whose parent held a cookie out of reach. Gimme, gimme, gimme.

“I don’t want to get prints on anything.”

She checked her pockets. “I don’t have a tissue on me. Where’s your purse?”

The magical rescue purse as Gavin had dubbed it; less of a purse and more of a large, leather, diaper bag. Anything I could ever possibly need in any emergency situation resided in my purse. Along with the wallet I could never find when I needed it, and the cell phone I never remembered to plug in to recharge.

“I left my purse in the car.”

“Catherine!”

“Oh, please. We’re in freakin’ Mayberry for God’s sake.”

After all, there’d only been murders since we’d arrived. I hadn’t heard a word about thefts.

“Still.”

“Just give me the baggy you were using on the powder then.”

Her left brow arched. She didn’t need to ask if I were insane.

“I won’t open the bag. I just want to wrap the outside of the bag over my hand.”

Her face lit like a light switch had just been flicked on.

“Wait, I have another baggy.” She reached around, and pulled a baggy from behind her, and held it out for me to take.

“I don’t even want to know where that bag has been, do I?”

“Oh, stop.” She fluttered the plastic like a handkerchief. “Just take the damned bag.”

I pinched the thin plastic between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and held it away from me. “Where no man has gone before?”

“You are sick and twisted, Catherine.”

“A reoccurring theme in my life.”

I sheathed my hand in plastic, reached under the bench and pulled out a small anchor. The anchor resembled the one that Digs had showed us, with sharp spades on each side; a vicious looking little anchor. From the paint chipping away, the anchor wasn’t new, but it was shiny clean.

“Voila,” Louise said. “Looks like we have our probable cause.”

I nodded. “Let’s tell Sheriff Anderson.”

I replaced the anchor under the seat.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By the time we made it to the jail, the Sheriff was well past his second cup of whiskey. He was hunched behind his desk with the brim of his cap pulled low over his alcohol glazed eyes. He cradled his coffee mug in both hands.

I slammed the door behind me. He jumped. Shit, I jumped, but I wanted to see how far down Sheriff Anderson was in hazy hell.

“Welcome back, Detectives.” He hunched lower over his cup.

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “We just couldn’t stay away.”

“Sheriff.” Louise stood beside his desk. “We think we have enough evidence to make an arrest in the murder of Warren Pease.”

He squinted up at her through whiskey-blurred eyes, then pressed the fingertips of his right hand to his temple without lowering his cup. “God you’re tall. Please sit down. You’re making my head throb towering over me like that.”

She gestured to me, as if I could do something to make him understand the importance of what she’d said. I shrugged and held my hands wide palms up. There wasn’t anything I could do about her height. She should have drunk more coffee growing up; it would have stunted her growth like it did mine. At least that’s what Grandma always told me.

“Sit!”

He rubbed his temples so hard he pulled the skin around his eye sockets back, as if he were trying to remove his eyes from a cellophane wrapper. His eyes bulge out like a frog.

“Damn, my head hurts.”

Louise sat with a graceful ease that made it clear she sat only because she wanted to sit, not because of his command. She crossed the ankle of her good leg around the ankle of her bad. Even injured she managed to be lady like.

“You sit down too,” he barked at me.

Just like my own Chief back home. I was beginning to miss the old bastard.

“I can’t keep looking up and down, up and down. I’d rather have you both on one level where I can see you without having to move my head too much.”

I sat next to Louise and grinned at her. Impatience seethed through the cracks in her placid exterior. The Sheriff’s down home inefficiencies would eventually eat away what was left of her calm, and drive her the rest of the way to crazy. Speed and results are what she wanted. Let’s see how nice, nice she could be now that she wasn’t the one in control this time. This time she was a consultant. Free to make all the suggestion she wanted, but essentially one step away from being a bystander.

“Now, what were you saying?” He put his lips to the edge of the cup and puckered up.

“We have enough evidence to merit and arrest warrant,” Louise said.

He pulled the cup away and squinted at her. “Arrest who?”

He pursed his lips again and brought the cup up.

“Patrick King,” I said.

He pulled the cup away again and set it on the desk. “You can’t be serious. His wife gave him an alibi. How can you explain that? Plus there’s no evidence that he was anywhere near the resort when Bruce McMahan was killed. He’s not the guy.”

He picked up the cup again.

“He lied and so did she. And we don’t believe the two murders are connected,” Louise said.

I noticed how she managed to include me in her bold statement even though I hadn’t come around to embrace this particular theory, yet.

He slammed the cup on the desktop. Whiskey slopped over the sides and splashed the papers littering his desk. He didn’t bother to try to clean it up.

“What are you talking about? First, I’m not prepared to believe that our two murders are coincidental. Second, I have known Samantha and Patrick King all their lives. They are two of the most honest generous people I know.”

He rubbed his temples again.

“He told me he lied,” I said. “When I went with him to the barn to see his horses.”

A heavy sigh escaped him. “And you didn’t mention this to me yesterday, because?”

I gave a nonchalant shrug. “Slipped my mind.”

He looked doubtful. He had a right to be. I was lying, but at the time, Mr. King had given me the information there was no conclusive evidence linking him to the crime. There had been no reason to make Patrick King the talk of a small town. Not that he wasn’t already.

“I don’t believe much slips your mind, Detective.”

Louise jumped to my rescue. “I’ve been working with her for three years. Believe me a lot of things slip her mind.” She looked at me and pursed her lips. “A lot.”

No problem. I wasn’t upset. She would pay for her little jab someday. I didn’t know where or when, but just when Louise least expected it, wham-o! Retaliation.

“What is this proof?” He fumbled through a drawer until he finally found a napkin to wipe up his whiskey spill.

“We were out at the marina –“

“Why?”

Louise let out an irritated sigh.

“We were just sightseeing,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He dabbed at the spill with little success; the puddle was too big and the napkin too small. “Go on.”

Louise crept to the edge of her seat. “While we were at the marina we noticed the door on the King’s big boat open.”

I nodded like a yes man.

“We were worried that something might have been stolen,” she said.

“How would you have known?”

“What do you mean?”

“If something
had
been stolen, how would you have known? You’d never been on the boat before.”

Damn. Barney Fife was sobering up. When did he get so smart? I don’t think I like the on-his-toes sheriff. I wanted drunk-and-dazed sheriff back.

“That’s beside the point,” I said and hoped he would accept my statement as the, shut-up and listen, it was.

He rolled his hands around each other and rolled his eyes back up into his head. “Get on with it. What evidence do you have? We’ll discuss the legalities of what you did later.”

“The boat’s been cleaned Sheriff. The turf on the inside of the cabin.” The words came out as if I were asking for approval. I hated that sound. At some point in my career, I’d be able to present my case without it sounding like I was waiting for a “good girl” response, but I hadn’t yet reached that point.

“Maybe it was dirty.”

I looked at Louise. “Did we leave out the part about, Digs?”

“Yes, you did,” she said.

Imagine leaving Digs out. I did tend to get ahead of myself when I told stories leaving out minor, but important parts, of the story.

“Digs found a brown piece of synthetic industrial carpeting on the first victim, and a gash in his head from a boat anchor.”

“Who found this evidence?”

“Digs, our forensic guy from the BCA.”

He tossed the soaked napkin into the trash beside his desk. “Right, Randy. Sorry. Go on.”

“There’s not much more to tell,” Louise said. “There was turf and a gash in his head.”

“How does Randy know that the gash was from an anchor?”

“Take our word for it,” I said. “He knows. He knows everything. It’s downright scary.”

I wiggled my fingers, widened my eyes, and gave a melodic ooo, ooo, ooo, like scary Sci-Fi music.

“Do you know how many boats we have around here? This is a resort town. I would bet that ninety percent of them have brown synthetic carpeting in the bottoms.”

“But.” I held up a finger. “Mr. King's boat has recently been cleaned. And his wife was having an affair with Warren Pease. I’d say that narrows it down a bit, don’t you?”

“You happened to notice this when you were locking up for him?” He leaned his elbows on the desk and held his head in his hands, like he could no longer support the weight.

“That’s correct.”

He lifted his head and gave me a hard look. The same not-funny look the chief gives me when he doesn’t approve of my humor, and it is humor in my mind. Even if he didn’t understand it.

He took a sip from his cup, then leaned back in his chair. He sucked the whiskey from his lips. “Okay, I’ll get a search warrant, and we’ll do this right. I’ll get Randy in there to do a proper investigation. We’ll see what turns up. Until then you two – ” He stabbed two forked fingers at us. “Take no actions.”

“Okay.” I splayed my hands. “We’ll just be on vacation.”

Louise and I got up to leave.

“Detectives. I assume you understand that means no more breaking and entering.”

Righteous indignation burned through me. We hadn’t broken anything. The glass door had been opened waiting for us.

“That’s an ugly accusation, Sheriff.”

He stood and hooked his thumbs between his gun belt and pants.

“That may be. But it’s a damned accurate one. I’m not kidding, Detective’s. You go fishing, read a book, whatever you want to do, but I don’t want you to interfere unless I ask for your help. Understood?”

“Understood,” Louise said.

I understood, but I wasn’t at all happy about it. I had my doubts that the Sheriff knew what he was doing. He did seem to be more competent with a few shots in him than he did dead sober. If this town ever had a real crisis situation on their hands, they’d need to keep the Sheriff on a continuous whiskey I.V. drip to make sure he’d be able to cope.