Murder on the First Day of Christmas (Chloe Carstairs Mysteries) (36 page)

    
“Where’s Margie?” I was suddenly worried about our favorite florist.

    
“At the shop, of course, arranging flowers the same as always. You don’t think I would hurt her?”

    
“Well, you have been on something of a killing spree these last couple of weeks.” I stepped from behind Mom. These boots were made for kicking. All I needed was an opportunity.

    
Cassie nodded sheepishly, conceding the point.

    
“I’m surprised you would try anything against Margaret-Anne so soon after your last attack,” Mom said.

    
“I’m not here for her, not yet at least. Guns can be so loud and messy. No, I’ll be delivering some flowers here tonight. A nice officer called and said you recommended Flower Fantasy. I can’t thank you enough.”

    
I shot Mom a look she ignored. “At the time, I didn’t know you were out to avenge the death of your father.”

    
“My dad was innocent, Mrs. Carstairs. Framed by Oscar Browley with a little help from Margaret-Anne here and a few others who shall remain nameless.”

    
“Judge Stone, for instance?” I asked.

    
“Ah, you girls have been busy. When I heard Chloe on the phone pumping Margie for information, I thought it best to follow you around for a while. When you headed over here, I knew you were putting it all together, not that it’ll do you any good.”

    
“Why do you say that? The police know everything we do,” Mom said.

    
“Now why don’t I believe you?” Cassie asked with a slight smile. “No matter. I’m almost finished with everyone on my Christmas list.”

    
Margaret-Anne murmured in her sleep.

    
“We’d better go,” Cassie said.

    
“Go?” Mom met her gaze. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”

    
“I’m not going to kill you. I give you my word. You’re not part of this. I only want revenge on the people who killed my father. Till that’s done, I’m taking you somewhere, tying you up and giving myself a head start.”

    
“Tie us up here,” Mom suggested. “Margaret-Anne probably has rope.

    
“Or handcuffs,” I added. “Handcuffs would work.”

    
Obviously, Mom and I were on the same page. Never get in the car with a homicidal maniac.

    
“Right. Leave you at a cop’s house with all her cop buddies dropping in - not likely. Now come on.”

    
We looked at her skeptically.

    
“Or I could kill you right here.” Cassie leveled the revolver at me. “It would be messy, noisy and blow my plan all to hell, but if that’s what you want.”

    
“I’ll drive,” Mom capitulated.

    
Cassie pointed at me. “She can drive. Now move!”

     We did.

     In the Cadillac, Cassie placed Mom in the back and me behind the wheel, then settled in the passenger seat, facing sideways, so she could keep an eye on both of us.

    
“Does this thing have child safety locks?” Cassie asked. “I wouldn’t want your mom jumping out.”

    
“They’re already on,” I assured her.

    
“And let’s store your purses in the way-back. That way there’ll be no cell phones spoiling our fun.”

    
She was good. I had to give her that. We did as we were told, and I backed The Tank out of the drive.

    
“This car’s huge. My feet don’t even touch the floor. How does a little thing like you maneuver?” Cassie asked Mom.

    
“I manage.”

    
Cassie laughed. “I don’t doubt that for a second.”

    
“Where to?” I paused at a stop sign.

    
“I’m thinking Saul’s house, how does that sound? Margie sent me out there to pick up some stuff yesterday, and what do you know? Meagan was headed back to Berkeley. Shame I forgot to give back her key.”

    
With a thirty-minute drive ahead of us in holiday traffic, I decided to get answers to the rest of my questions. Plus, it would keep Cassie talking while I thought of a way out of this mess.

    
“Aren’t you curious about how we figured it all out?” I asked as I got us onto Highway 31 heading south.

    
“Sure. We have time to kill, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

    
“It was really quite simple when you knew where to look. I was watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
when I noticed striking similarities to your description of your father.”

    
“My father was better than the main character. Everybody loved him. Everybody turned to him for help,” Cassie stated defiantly, “but nobody helped him when he needed it.”

     I let that one pass.

     “Then when we were watching a DVD of Saul’s party,” Mom threw in, “we caught your little trick with the pipers.”

    
“Pretty smart, huh? I had planned to tamper with Saul’s medications - maybe frame Robin, maybe not, but when I saw how many people hated Saul, I figured why not go for a two-for-one deal and get Oscar in on the action? Two deaths at two parties - same suspects at both? It’d be weeks before anyone sorted it all out, if they ever did. Meanwhile, I could take care of the rest of my Christmas list.”

    
“So Judge Stone was a lucky break?” Mom asked. “His being in the hospital and your delivering flowers to him.”

    
“I like to think you make your own luck in this world, but yes, his being in the hospital did make things easier. Last year, I saw an article about your Christmas houses, and knew that was the in I had been looking for. It was like a sign, you know?”

    
“You had planned this for a while.” I stated.

    
“Practically my whole life. When I was five, it wasn’t an obsession - more a childish whim - you hurt me, I’ll hurt you back.”

    
Still is, I thought. Only there was nothing childish about her methods.

    
“But then I got older, life got harder and I got madder. I realized how much had been taken from me. I didn’t know what I could do about it, but I had to do something, right? Luckily, in tenth grade, Janie-Lee Jensen gave me an idea.”

    
“Who’s Janie-Lee Jensen?” I took the exit onto Highway 280.

    
“Girl I went to school with. Nasty little thing. Not one of the popular girls, nothing cliché like that. Just one of those spiteful, careless girls who dish out random cruelties, fascinated by their power to do so.” Cassie glanced at my side of the dashboard. “Slow down. We don’t want a ticket.”

    
I hadn’t meant to let the speedometer sneak above sixty, but her talk of mean girls had gotten to me. Had I been the Janie-Lee Jensen of Angela’s life? Thoughtless? Vicious? I felt a slow burn of guilt remembering how my friends and I had laughed at her journal. In my recollections, my laughter had been the loudest and most cruel.

    
“One time,” Cassie continued, “Janie-Lee pointed out that a girl’s shirt was on inside out. It didn’t have a pattern or anything, just a plain T-shirt, but Janie-Lee noticed and said it was because the girl and her brother had been having sex at the bus stop before school. Everyone laughed and laughed.”

    
Mom and I remained quiet, probably both wondering where this was going.

    
“They laughed at me, too, but the joke’s on them now, because what she did turned out to be a good thing.”

    
“What did she do?” I asked.

    
“Put a copy of
We, the Jury
in my locker, wrapped up like a real pretty Christmas present you would be excited to get, especially if Christmas was a hard time around your house. This after she had read selected parts to her friends.  And, yeah, it was hateful, but it put a name to my pain - a bunch of names. I made my Christmas list that year, and I’ve kept it with me ever since.”

    
Nobody said much for a few miles as we inched through holiday traffic, stoplights blinking a bright red and green, shoppers rushing home with their presents. “So, you saw the article and got a job with Margie,” I broke the silence.

    
Cassie nodded, a little subdued. “I’ve always been passionate about flowers, so working at a florist shop was a natural. I asked around and discovered that Margie was the florist you guys always used. When I saw that delivery slip for flowers to Judge Stone, you can imagine how excited I was.”

    
“And you gave him a shot of something, or tampered with his IV?” I asked.

    
“Digitalis, the same as Saul. It’s a derivative of foxglove leaves. A few clicks on the Internet, and making your own is a cinch. Since Stone already had heart issues, it didn’t set off any alarms, which was important. The deaths couldn’t be suspicious, or I couldn’t continue.”

    
I met my mother’s gaze in the rear view mirror. Unbelievable!

    
“Then I took those discs. The way Saul had guarded them, I figured they contained something important, and I had heard him tell Angela they referred to old cases. Oscar’s cases as it turned out, but I didn’t know that. I hoped there might be something about my dad.”

    
“And the passwords?”

    
“That part was easy. I followed Saul for days, figuring out the best way to kill him. When I first started tracking him, I sent him an email with an embedded spyware program and retrieved lots of information about his password, which was his date of birth. He used the same one for everything - online banking, email accounts. Know thy enemy.”

    
“And when you opened the discs, you read about Oscar fixing cases,” Mom prompted.

    
“Something clicked then. In my heart, I’d always known my dad had been framed and something was screwy with the case. Sure enough, there it was.”

    
“Saul didn’t have anything on the discs about your dad, though,” Mom pointed out.

    
“Not specifically, but it showed a precedent, a long-term pattern of abuse.”

    
This definitely wasn’t the time to tell her that before his execution, her father had sent a note apologizing to the widow of the security guard he had slain. Something else occurred to me. “That’s why you changed your MO. No more poisons or deaths that didn’t arouse much suspicion.”

    
“It wasn’t a conscious decision.” Her voice hardened. “But then I saw Oscar sitting there all dressed up, so smug with his bag of gifts. It didn’t seem fair that he should enjoy another Christmas, when he had ruined mine for twenty years. I mean, a Santa Claus? That bastard.”

    
“Why did you send us the discs?” Mom changed the subject, lightening the mood.

Cassie shrugged.
“My plan was still a good one, and more important than ever now that a full-blown murder investigation is underway. I knew you wouldn’t turn the discs over to the cops right away. An anonymous phone call to the DA’s office - they don’t record their calls the way the cops do - would buy me the time I needed to finish my list. You would get caught with the discs and stop investigating. Suspicion would turn to you, or the cops would figure you were protecting Angela. Either way, I stayed off the radar. It was nice of Jack Lassiter to take the bait and be my fall guy, but it didn’t buy me as much time as I had hoped.”

    
Cassie’s matter-of-fact avenging angel tone was chilling. Still that petulant child who had been denied what she wanted for Christmas, she was killing anyone she blamed for her displeasure. Did that include us?

    
“You left something out.” Mom said.

    
“What? Oh, you mean the hand. That didn’t turn out the way I had planned.”

    
“You meant it to scare Saul.” Mom stated.

    
“I wanted him to feel powerless, to have people look at him with suspicion and to feel things happening to him that he couldn’t control.”

    
“But he didn’t play along,” I pointed out.

    
“He turned the whole thing into a joke that helped him sell more of his vile books.”

    
“How did you get the hand in the first place?”

    
“How’d you get the hand in the first place?”

    
“Like I said, I’d been following Saul to figure out the best way to kill him. I wanted to know his routine, his Achilles heel. I was there, hidden at the warehouse, when he talked to two friends of Trianos’s. They were sweating this guy about some missing money, not because they thought he took it, but because they thought he knew who did. The guy starts blubbering, admits to everything. Saul must’ve figured out was about to happen and got the hell out of there. I didn’t think I could leave without getting caught so I stayed put.”