by Claire Booth
Hank was surely going to some special kind of hell for what he had to do next. He leaned a little more on to the counter and confided that he had a friend who needed a job and this seemed like a good one. Were there other stores? Oh yes, she said. She’d never seen them, but there were three others. She’d be happy to give Hank the name of her manager so his friend could ask about employment opportunities. His name was Vic Melnicoe and he worked the closing shift today, from three to nine.
It was just after one thirty now. Hank thanked her and finished paying for the fondue pot. He asked for a bigger bag than the one she’d given him and she ducked into the back to get him one. As the door swung shut behind her, he caught a glimpse of the back room. It was almost completely empty.
Sam walked out of Donorae’s with a hot cup of coffee in his hand and a smile on his face. He didn’t want to get back in his squad car just yet, so he wandered down Main Street and stopped under the big trees next to the First Presbyterian Church. He leaned against the walkway railing and looked down the hill over downtown and toward Lake Taneycomo. He figured they wouldn’t mind if he hung out for a bit. He replayed what Sheila’d told him about last night’s arrest of Lonnie Timmons. It sounded like the dude just went nuts. And it sure made him look guilty. Lonnie and his temper could’ve come down here easy, argued with his dad, killed him, and then fled back up to Des Moines. So far, there was nothing to prove otherwise.
He took a sip of coffee and stared at the cloudy sky. What he saw, though, was a ransacked bedroom and a pulverized Clyde Timmons. And there was just something about it that didn’t fit. It didn’t seem like Lonnie was the kind of guy who would have the presence of mind to lock everything up on his way out. He’d be more likely to tear out of there immediately, with the doors left wide open and his car tires squealing. People would’ve noticed. But nobody did. So there was a certain amount of stealth.
He set his to-go cup down next to the railing and pulled out his notes from last night. The bocce players. He flipped through the papers but nothing jumped out at him. He stuffed the notebook back in his pocket. Hank would tell him to replay the interviews in his head. Let them unspool in his mind and see if he realized something that he hadn’t caught while it was happening. He took a breath and closed his eyes.
They snapped open a minute later. He fumbled for his cell and punched Kurt’s number.
‘Have you found any bocce balls?’
‘Huh?’ the crime scene tech said.
‘Bocce balls. Have you found any in Timmons’s house?’
‘What’s a bocce ball look— well, wait. It doesn’t matter. The only balls we found were in a pack of tennis balls in the laundry cupboard. So no, no bocce balls.’
Sam hung up and started to pace. If Dick Maher had a canvas bag to carry his bocce balls, then Mr Timmons probably did, too. And if you swung one of those things around, it would become a sixteen-pound club. He needed to get a hold of the forensic pathologist. He pulled up his contact list as he started to run back to his car, his coffee cup forgotten on the walkway.
The email subject line should have read Low-life asshat. But Sheila bowed to professionalism and titled it Timmons arrest instead. She clicked send and Lonnie’s mug shot, complete with bloodshot eyes and scratched face, shot off to the Des Moines watch commander as a thank you for his help. He responded immediately.
This’ll go up in our squad room. Make everybody’s day. PS You go ahead and keep him. We don’t need him back.
That was just the opening she was hoping for.
You have anybody to spare who could check the alibi he gave me? We think our victim was killed between sometime Saturday and Monday night. He claims he was at the Steam nightclub both Saturday and Sunday nights. And that he went shopping Monday at the Hy-Vee. Just those two locations. If we can blow that apart, no way will our judges down here grant him bail.
This time, she attached a photo of the trashed motel room. Again, the reply was immediate.
He’s upped his game. No problem on the alibi check. I’ll let you know.
Thank goodness. Because she sure as hell didn’t have enough manpower to spare someone for a trip to Iowa. She didn’t have enough to investigate things properly right here in her own county. Not having Hank made things much more difficult. Easier, too, of course. She wasn’t having to talk him out of conspiracy theories or make sure that he wasn’t putting himself in dangerous situations. But his absence made her realize how much of the workload he carried when they were investigating a homicide. Not that she’d ever admit it.
She swung around in her desk chair and contemplated her white board patrol schedule. She just needed to accept that this month’s budget was blown. She’d have to try to make it up next month, she thought, as she turned to her computer and opened the file with the jail staff schedule. No one had access to this but her. Ever since that meeting with all the jailers, she had provided each one with only his or her individual schedule. Trading for overtime became more difficult if nobody knew when anybody else was working. Not impossible, certainly, but she needed to throw up every roadblock she could.
She looked at today’s lineup and saw that Gerald Tucker would be working. She’d had to switch him to swing shift in order to make her other changes work correctly. He’d been working graveyard for almost a year, ever since Hank banished him to the jail after the Branson Beauty explosion. But that meant he’d been working too often with Bubba Berkins, and those two together were far more than twice the threat of Tucker alone. They covered for each other and left the jail understaffed, lied about inmate welfare, stoked resentment and insubordination, leaked information, and God knows what else. So she needed to split them up. Since Bubba was closer to retirement, she hoped that keeping him on overnight shifts might hasten his departure. Not that she’d been reading medical studies about how bad overnight shifts were for your health, or anything.
But she was under no illusion that Tucker would stop sabotaging Hank just because he didn’t have Bubba anymore. She knew he’d keep feeding biased information to the county commissioners, who controlled their budget and loved to hear how she and Hank were mismanaging the department. Which they weren’t, but Tucker was an old-school, good ol’ Ozark boy, and there were folks who took his word as gospel just on account of that. She hoped that isolating him on this shift – with deputies like Molly March who had no bone to pick with Hank – would start to choke off his information pipeline.
She hadn’t figured on quite this amount of anger about the overtime ban, though. It could turn into a real easy match for Tucker to come along and light. And she couldn’t think of any way to make it less volatile. All she could do was keep a very careful eye on things and hope that enough sensible deputies would be able to hold sway over the hot-heads.
She flipped through her spreadsheet and was making a few new adjustments when Sam texted to ask if she was in her office. She replied in the affirmative and moved to set the phone down when it rang with a number she didn’t know. She clicked ignore and listened instead to the sound of those big ol’ feet running down the outer hallway. Sammy burst in, fresh out of breath and waving his arms.
‘It was bocce balls.’
She raised an eyebrow and waited.
‘Bocce balls. The murder weapon.’
Now she sat up straight. She hadn’t heard anything from the pathologist. ‘Where’d you get that?’
‘I was at the church … and I replayed it in my head … Mr Maher’s foyer … and ball bags and …’
She made him stop, sit down, and start over. That slowed him down enough for her to untwist his loopy train of thought.
‘And you talked to Dr Whitaker?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. Just now. He said that absolutely a bag full of heavy thirteen-inch-around balls, swung together, could cause those kinds of injuries. So it’s got to be that the bag was the murder weapon. Plus’ – he jabbed a finger at her excitedly – ‘there were no balls in the house. And there should’ve been, what wi
th him being so into the game. That’s confirmation to me. ’Cause the killer took them.’
He finally took a breath and flopped back in his chair. Sheila knew she was gaping at him but she couldn’t help it. It was brilliant. She was so proud of him. She was about to say so when he leaned forward again.
‘And here’s the other thing I think. There was a lamp right there that would’ve made a great club, right? Why use something else?’ He waved his finger at her again. ‘Because it meant something. Using the balls meant something.’
Now he was getting a little too far out there. ‘You’re reading too much into it, Sammy. It could’ve just been the killer grabbing what was handy.’
‘The lamp was handy,’ he said.
‘Maybe not. Who knows where Timmons was standing when the fight started? The lamp could’ve been across the room.’
Sam started to look obstinate. She decided to let it go. At this juncture, it was pointless anyway. They couldn’t prove which one of them was right until they figured out who the killer was.
TWENTY
Vic Melnicoe arrived right on time for his shift at Number Four. The sweet female clerk, whose name Hank realized he hadn’t gotten, left in a battered sedan. He hoped that what he was about to do wouldn’t end up costing her a job. He had a great vantage point from the gas station across the street, which was also busy enough to mask the fact that he’d been sitting there in the BMW much longer than an ordinary customer. And he had to say, this car was ruining him for surveillance in anything else. He’d never be comfortable in his cruiser again, with its lack of satellite radio, heated seats, and leather upholstery.
His plan was to wait a little for Melnicoe to settle into his shift and then go in and buy something else. He mainly wanted to get a sense of the guy before he called Fin. He had a feeling he would need every bit of information possible in order to convince her to call the police. He sipped at his industrial-sized gas station Diet Pepsi and watched the manager go into the back room several times. Then he planted himself in front of the second cash register. It looked like he was ringing up purchases, but there were no customers. In some other retail store, Hank would have thought he was working on online orders, but last-century Lew had no internet presence. The guy was bent intently to his task. It looked like a good time to interrupt.
Hank drove back over and walked in with a bounce in his step. He walked right up to the counter before Melnicoe had a chance to hide the paperwork next to the register. It appeared to be an inventory list. Some items were checked off and others weren’t.
‘Hi, there. How you doing today?’ Hank smiled. ‘I was wondering if you could help me. I’m looking for something for my little girl. I’ve been gone a while – business trip, you see – and I got one more sales call to make, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. You got anything I could grab real quick and take home to give her?’
Melnicoe blinked in surprise and took an involuntary step back under the force of Hank’s monologue. He was in his late twenties and on the skinny side, with a curly brown nest of hair atop a thin, pinched face and big, wide-set eyes that continued to blink rapidly. Hank leaned in, placing his hands on the counter and moving his smiling face much closer to the stack of papers.
‘Yes, um, of … of course,’ Melnicoe stuttered. He took another step back. By now, Hank was practically hovering over the counter. He was able to get a glimpse of the register’s monitor, which showed a purchase of more than three hundred dollars. A person could buy a whole aisle worth of merchandise for that kind of money. He wasn’t able to see much else because Melnicoe moved away from the counter and walked hesitantly toward the aisles. He clearly had no idea what they contained. Hank was dying to stay put and keep reading, but had to follow in order to keep up his act. They wandered down two rows before finding a collection of stuffed animals that Hank had noticed on his first visit.
‘We got these.’ Melnicoe pointed.
Hank shrugged and asked if there was anything else. They searched another section while Hank kept up a steady soliloquy about his fake daughter and finally found a small collection of kid art supplies. Hank went back and forth for way too long, just to mess with the guy. He wanted him still flustered when they went back up to the checkout. He finally decided on a box of big sidewalk chalk and a bottle of bubble-blowing solution. At least his real kids could use them. They sure as hell didn’t need any more stuffed animals.
As Melnicoe steered him toward the registers, he switched conversational gears.
‘So I gotta be honest – I never noticed this place before. How long has it been here?’
‘Three years.’
‘Really? Well, who knew? Have you worked here the whole time?’
They reached the counter, and Melnicoe looked like he’d reached the end of his rope. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The whole time.’
‘Seems pretty niche. What’d you do before this? Same kind of thing somewhere?’
‘It’s not niche at all. It’s retail. I worked at a Walmart before this.’
‘Well, this is a lot more quiet, that’s for sure,’ Hank said. ‘Any room for advancement?’
Melnicoe didn’t even bother to answer that one. He grabbed the chalk and rang it up on the same register the Latina clerk had used, not the one he’d been working on when Hank walked into the store.
‘Can I have the bubbles, please?’ He held out his hand.
‘Oh, yeah. Sorry. Just thinking about my next call.’ Hank grinned and gave him the bottle. ‘I sure appreciate your help. What’s your name?’
‘Vic.’ He stuffed the items in a plastic bag while his eyes kept glancing at the other register. Hank wondered if he was trying to meet a deadline.
‘There you go.’ He shoved the bag at Hank. ‘There’s the door.’
‘Well, thank you. I might stop by my next time through here and …’
He didn’t bother finishing. Vic had disappeared into the back room. Hank chuckled as he walked out. His wallet was seven dollars lighter, but the shopping trip had been priceless.
The office coffee was sludge. Sam sniffed at it, then drank some as quickly as he could. He needed the caffeine. He couldn’t believe he’d lost his latte. He was pretty sure he’d left it at the church, but he could’ve left it on the roof of his car, too. He’d certainly done that before. He choked down another swallow as Sheila walked in. She laughed at him.
‘I thought you stopped drinking that stuff and only did fancy Donorae coffee now.’
He felt himself turning red and changed the subject.
‘It’s been a long couple days,’ he said. ‘I just need a little pickup before I start chasing down more on the bocce guys.’
She fed money into the vending machine and pulled out a bag of chips.
‘And I want their balls,’ she said.
Sam snickered. She waved a finger at him.
‘I know exactly what I’m saying. I want all of their bocce balls. We’re assuming that it was Timmons’s that were used, but they each own a set. I want Alice and Kurt to process every single one of them. And if we find blood or other trace evidence on somebody’s, then his more personal set of balls is mine, too.’
She tore open her chip bag and left the room calmly munching away, leaving Sam laughing into his coffee mug. He forced the rest of the drink down as he walked to the conference room, where it was nice and quiet, and placed a call to Plano, Texas, where the one bocce player not in Branson when Clyde died was visiting his daughter. The others were suspects, and Sam didn’t know how much to trust what they were telling him, but Adam Moreno had no reason to lie. He came right to the phone when Sam asked to speak with him.
‘Oh, Lord, it’s so horrible. Poor Clyde. Ward called me yesterday and told me about it. I can’t believe it.’
‘Do you know of anyone who was angry at Mr Timmons?’
‘You mean aside from his son? Well, hang on. I don’t know that Lonnie was angry at him, just that they didn’t have a good relationship. Didn’t talk
– things like that.’
That was all he knew about it until recently, Mr Moreno said. But he and his wife were down in Texas because their daughter just had a baby. The whole bocce group had known she was due soon, which had prompted several conversations about kids and grandchildren. One morning at their diner meetup, he and Clyde were the first ones there and got to talking.
‘It was about how tricky it is – relationships with your kids. I’m real lucky. Mine still talk to me. And they’ve given me grandkids, which has brought us closer. I mean, I’d do anything to see those little guys. I wish Lonnie had a kid, maybe that would’ve helped his and Clyde’s relationship. Maybe they both would’ve bent a little.’
‘So they didn’t bend? Is that it?’
Mr Moreno pondered that. ‘I think so. Yeah, Lonnie was a shit, pardon my French. But Clyde wasn’t willing to forgive.’
Sam frowned. Those two things didn’t necessarily jell.
‘Wait – it’s one thing to be, uh, “a shit”, so to speak. But when you say “forgive”, it sounds like you mean something specific, not Lonnie’s general, uh … lifestyle choices.’
‘I guess I do mean that. When we were talking about Lonnie that day, Clyde referred to something. I don’t know what it was exactly, but he said something like, “There are things you can’t undo. He can never atone.” Then he got all choked up and couldn’t say anything else. My heart broke for the guy.’
