Dolled Up to Die (2 page)

“Yes, Jo-Jo Kieferson. You’re a lot younger than I expected.” She sounded disapproving. “And a lot more redheaded.”

Cate couldn’t think of any suitable response to that. At twenty-nine, she didn’t think of herself as terribly young, although by Jo-Jo’s standards she probably was. And she was definitely redheaded.

She followed Jo-Jo Kieferson through a back porch/laundry room and stepped into a homey kitchen with sunny yellow walls decorated with cute-kitten calendars and wall plaques. Ivy trailed from baskets above the cabinets. A huge teddy-bear-shaped cookie jar sat on the counter. An inviting kitchen scent of vanilla and cinnamon suggested the cookie jar was often full.

It did not look like the proper setting for a triple-homicide crime spree. And Jo-Jo Kieferson was either in shock now, or she’d calmed considerably since that panicky phone call.

“Cate?” Mitch’s voice came distantly from the cell phone that had slid to Cate’s chest.

She yanked the phone up to her ear. “Everything’s okay. I’m inside the house now. I haven’t seen the, um, crime scene yet.”

“Keep talking to me.”

Jo-Jo frowned at Cate as if she considered the phone conversation rude.

“I have to keep in touch with my associate,” Cate explained to her.
Associate
wasn’t quite the right word for Mitch Berenski, but overprotective boyfriend sounded somewhat less professional.

“They’re in here.” Jo-Jo headed toward the adjoining room.

Heart thudding with apprehension, Cate followed.

 2 

Cate reported her progress to Mitch. “We’re in the dining room now . . . nice, old-fashioned table with claw feet . . . framed painting of Mt. Hood on the wall . . . now going into the living room. Everything’s still okay.”

Jo-Jo stopped in the archway to the living room. “That’s Marianne.” She flung a finger toward the figure in a child-sized rocking chair next to the brick fireplace. “As I told you, her head is gone.”

Yes, it was.

“Lucinda’s over there.”

Brown-haired Lucinda, in a girlish pink dress, sat behind an old-fashioned school desk. She was faceless, the front of her head blown away.

“And Toby, with the gunshot hole in his chest.”

Toby sat in a window seat, a fishing pole dangling a line into a miniature pond of blue plastic at his feet.

“Cate, I heard that!” Mitch said. “It sounds like a-a slaughter!”

“Well, yes, it is kind of a slaughter,” Cate said to Mitch. Marianne’s head gone. Lucinda’s face shattered. Toby with the hole in his chest. “But they’re
dolls
.”

“Dolls?” Mitch repeated.

“They look almost like real children. But they’re dolls, big, life-sized dolls.” Dead dolls.

The hole in Toby’s chest leaked white pellets, not blood, and the remaining section of Lucinda’s head was hollow. The pieces of head on the floor were ceramic shards, not bone. No ugly scent of death thickened the air.

Yet it was a macabre scene because the figures appeared so truly childlike. Except for the leaking hole in his chest, Toby looked like a mischievous seven-year-old, sprinkle of freckles on his nose, blond hair tousled. The fact that he was still smiling only seemed to make the scene more macabre. Plus there was Lucinda’s eyeball looking up from the floor.

“Did you tell 911 that the, um, victims were dolls?” Cate asked Jo-Jo.

“The woman was going to send an ambulance, so I explained why that wouldn’t be necessary. I suppose that’s why the police aren’t in any hurry to get here.” Jo-Jo sounded resentful about this discriminatory attitude toward non-human victims. “Perhaps I should have mentioned it to you too.”

Yes, that would have been helpful. Cate made a mental note for future PI reference:
Always inquire if victims actually have human DNA.

But the police should be here. Even if there weren’t actually dead human bodies, someone had been flinging real bullets around.

“Do you know anyone who would want to injure—” Cate broke off and corrected that statement. Dolls, even ones that looked as lifelike as these, didn’t suffer injuries. “Anyone who would want to damage your dolls?”

“I think it was me the shooter was after. And since I wasn’t home, he just went after Marianne and Lucinda and Toby.” Jo-Jo’s voice went scratchy. “Destroying something he knew I loved.”

“He?”

“My former husband. Eddie the Ex.” Jo-Jo said the name as if she’d like to do something personally destructive to him.

“Eddie the Ex might want you dead?”

“Isn’t a dead ex-wife usually preferable to a live one? Although shooting dolls, that might be more of a woman thing, don’t you think? Maybe that new wife he left me for did it. If she could steal my husband, I sure wouldn’t put it past her to shoot my dolls.”

Noises coming from her cell phone reminded Cate that Mitch was still in the loop.

“Cate, I’m coming,” he said in her ear. “This is a weird situation. You don’t know what else a wacko who’d shoot dolls might do. What’s the address?”

“I can handle it,” Cate said. “Just go ahead with the cleanup job for Mr. Harriman.”

“We can do Harriman another day. I’ll call him. What’s the address?”

Cate finally supplied it, though she decided this was something she had to get straight with Mitch. Yes, she had called him to come to her rescue a couple of times. She’d had in mind having him come with her tonight. But having an overprotective male trailing along behind was not an image that suggested competent PI. She dropped the phone in her pocket.

Mitch was right about one thing, however. Shooting dolls qualified as weird. Maybe even a psycho thing? “What about the bullet hole in the mailbox?”

Jo-Jo’s wave dismissed that bullet hole as irrelevant. “That’s always been there. The stop sign down the road has seven of them. I think it’s a country thing.”

“Where did you get the dolls?”

Jo-Jo looked as indignant as if Cate had just asked if she
bought her children at Walmart. “I made them, of course. That’s what I do. Create dolls, usually in the image of real children. They’re very dear to me. And to the people I make them for.”

“Did you make Marianne and Lucinda and Toby for clients?”

“No. I keep them here in natural settings as displays of my work.” She reached over and smoothed the skirt on the headless doll. “I used a photo of my mother from her third grade class to create Marianne. And Toby is a boyfriend from my own second grade photo.”

Jo-Jo wasn’t acting as upset as if these were her real children, but a tear dribbled down her cheek. She brushed it away. Something clicked in Cate’s head.

“Do you know a woman named Krystal Lorister?” Cate had met the woman with a lifelike doll when she was investigating that other murder case. Seeing that doll in Krystal’s reading room with a book in hand, Cate had first thought it was a granddaughter. “I don’t remember the doll’s name.”

Jo-Jo beamed. “Camille! Yes, of course I remember Krystal and Camille. Actually, she’s the reason I called you. Krystal, I mean, not Camille.”

“You talked to Krystal tonight and she told you to call me?” Cate asked doubtfully.

“No, no, not tonight. She told me once that if I ever needed help, you’d be the person to contact. That you were really clever at investigating things. So I wrote your name down.”

“Krystal thought you might need help?”

“Eddie the Ex keeps trying to weasel out of his alimony. He has the most expensive restaurant in town, making money hand over fist, but he always acts as if he doesn’t have two jars of caviar to rub together.”

“So now you want me to investigate your ex-husband or find out who shot your dolls?”

“The dolls for right now. But I think they’re connected.”

Uncle Joe hadn’t been happy when Cate got involved in that other murder situation. Belmont Investigations didn’t do cops-and-robbers or violent stuff.

But this wasn’t murder, she argued with herself, and no killer was involved. And business had been slow. The economic crunch affected even private investigators.

“Belmont Investigations is a business, of course. We charge an hourly rate.”

“That’s okay.” Jo-Jo smiled slyly. “I’ll think of some way to make Eddie pay for it.”

“Did anyone know you were going to be away from home this evening?” Cate asked.

“I was talking to my friend Donna earlier. I might have told her. I don’t remember.”

Cate asked for Donna’s full name, address, and phone number. She wrote the information in a notebook she always carried in her purse now. “Do you have a list of people who’ve bought dolls from you?”

“I keep a scrapbook of all my dolls and the people who’ve adopted them.”

“Is there anyone among them who might be angry with you?”

“I don’t think so. My customers have always been very nice people.” Jo-Jo’s eyebrows crunched in a frown. “I don’t think not-nice people tend to be interested in dolls.”

Probably true. Cate couldn’t recall ever seeing a photo of a killer clutching his dolly. “You make the dolls right here?”

“I turned the master bedroom into a workshop. I create everything from the original molds for the head and arms and legs right down to making the clothing myself. I always put my initials on the fabric part of the body, kind of my personal signature.” Jo-Jo lifted headless Marianne’s skirt
and showed Cate the little JJ embroidered on the midsection of the doll. “I’ve been thinking maybe I should add a belly button, but I haven’t decided if it should be an innie or an outie. What do you think?”

Cate figured they had more important matters to think about than innie/outie belly buttons. But still . . . “An innie, I think. Is this a full-time business with you? Or a hobby?”

“It used to be a hobby, before Eddie the Ex had his midlife crisis. Now it’s a business. Do you have a little girl or boy? I could give you a nice discount.”

Sometimes Cate had fleeting visions of herself and Mitch and a family. She wanted a little girl or boy someday. Both, actually. But she wasn’t sure if her relationship with Mitch was headed that direction. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. Why do you live so far out of town? Wouldn’t it be better to have a location more accessible for clients?”

“That was a glitch in the divorce settlement. Eddie wanted our big house in town. My lawyer said okay, but if Eddie got the big house, he had to buy me another house. Unfortunately the lawyer didn’t specify where, and good ol’ Eddie stuck me out here in the boondocks. I imagine he and Kim got a big laugh out of that. Kim’s his new wife.” She paused to glance back toward the kitchen. “Although it’s a nice, cozy place, and I like it a lot better than the Ice Cube in town.”

“Doesn’t it make you uneasy living out here alone?”

“Not really. But I’ve been thinking maybe I’d move down to California or Arizona.”

“You have family there?”

“No. I raised Eddie’s two kids, but his son lives back east and his daughter Karen killed herself a few years ago. Karen and Eddie had been estranged for a long time, so that made it even worse for him.” Jo-Jo paused and swallowed. She
brushed a knuckle across her right eye, then swiped the wet knuckle on her leg. “Karen and I were close when she was little, and I’d kept hoping . . .”

Jo-Jo obviously felt very bad about her dolls, but Cate could see that this other loss went much deeper.

“But Eddie and his son are estranged too, and he never tried to fix that, even after Karen died. He can be stubborn as a mule. Although comparing Eddie and a mule is really unfair to the mule.”

“Have you checked the premises to make sure the shooter isn’t still here?”

Jo-Jo glanced uneasily toward the dark hallway leading off the living room. “I didn’t want to do it alone. But I don’t think anyone’s here or they’d have jumped out and shot me by now, don’t you think?”

Cate’s glance followed Jo-Jo’s. Her nerves shrieked an internal alarm siren when she spotted something standing there in the depths of the dim hallway. She touched Jo-Jo’s arm and pointed silently at the shadowy outline.

“That? That’s my dust mop. I didn’t want to get out the vacuum, so I was using the dust mop there in the hallway. I suppose girls your age don’t even know what a dust mop is.” Jo-Jo’s eyebrows pinched together in disapproval of the shortcomings of Cate’s generation.

Okay, Cate could see now that the shadowy figure was stick-handle thin. Maybe her nerves were a bit overwrought even if the victims here were only dolls. She certainly did know what a dust mop was, although it had always seemed to her an inefficient way of managing dirt.

“On the phone, you said you heard something. And then you didn’t answer when I tried to call back.”

“It was a noise, a kind of thud from down the hallway. I started to go see what it was, but then I got scared and hid
over there behind the sofa. The phone’s in the kitchen, and it stopped ringing before I got back to it.”

Now Cate also heard a noise from down the hallway. Thud.
Thud
. She and Jo-Jo both stiffened as if they’d turned into dolls themselves.

“You have a gun, don’t you?” Jo-Jo whispered.

“No.”

“I thought private investigators always had a gun. They do on TV.”

Cate chose not to explain that she had not yet reached gun-toting status. “Don’t you have a gun, living way out in the country like this?” she counter-whispered.

“I bought one when I first moved here. But I accidentally shot the hot-water heater, and after the flood I figured I’d better get rid of it. But we can find something in the kitchen to use as a weapon.”

Cate saw herself armed with a potato peeler while searching for a guy brandishing a gun with bullets. “I think we should go out to the car and wait for the police or my associate to arrive.”

Then another noise came from down the hall, not a thud this time. A much more familiar sound. Jo-Jo smiled delightedly at the yowl.