A Hot Flash of Homicide: Flamingo Cove Book One

by Dawn Dugle

  "Before a few years ago Lucio Nelson had no bank accounts, no job history and there's no family. It's like he popped up out of nowhere," Tripp said.

  "No family?" I was confused. Where was the first generation American parents? Where were the four sisters? Did Luke lie to me?

  "Nope," my brother frowned. "It's not enough to arrest him for the murder, but it's certainly suspicious. Plus, he has no alibi."

  "No alibi?" I squeaked.

  "Well, none that we know of. His credit card places him at Bellissimo Italian Restaurant on the night of the murder, but the time stamp on that was around nine-thirty p.m.," Diana explained. "We interviewed the bartender. He said Nelson was getting it on hot and heavy with some redhead the night of the murder, and he had to kick them out."

  "The bartender couldn't say for certain that the redhead was Claire Rousseau, because the place was packed that night and he wasn't really up on the art world goings on," Tripp continued. "Maybe things were getting too hot for Claire and Nelson didn't like it, killing her in a fit of rage."

  "Vern Reddy said his wife might have been having an affair with Nelson, but he had no proof," Bodie stated. "And you found no evidence of a crime scene when you searched Nelson's house."

  "Right," Diana said.

  The room got quiet as I thought about what Luke had told me. I wasn't ready to come clean to my brother that I was the redhead making out in the bar with his suspect, and that he definitely hadn't had an affair with Claire, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we were missing something.

  "How many tours of duty does it say Lucio Nelson had in the Marines?" I asked carefully.

  My brother looked down at the file. "One."

  Interesting. Luke told me he was injured during his second tour of duty. "Marines are a pretty proud bunch and it seems to me if you're going to lie about being in the military, you wouldn't lie about being a Marine. Is it possible he was a Marine, just not under the name Lucio Nelson?"

  Diana and Tripp looked at each other.

  "That's an interesting idea," Tripp scratched his chin. "We could search through service records, looking for a man fitting his description and age."

  "Plus how many of them could have two different-colored eyes?" I asked.

  Tripp looked confused. "Different eyes?"

  "You didn't notice?" Diana elbowed him. "He has one brown eye and one blue eye. It's kinda' hot."

  "I don't make it a habit to look deep into the eyes of other men," Tripp scoffed.

  "Too bad, his were spectacular," Diana winked.

  My brother shook his head. "That's neither here nor there. It shouldn't be too hard to find his real name. Good work, Wysdom."

  I felt sick, but smiled at my brother. "Bodie and I will go to the country club today and talk to the manager about the fight Claire Rousseau had there. And this evening, we have a date with some drag queens."

  "Drag queens?" Diana laughed. "Bodie, that seems a little on the nose."

  "Hey! Drag shows are very entertaining," Bodie sniffed. "But this isn't personal, it's work. A person of interest says he was at Midnight Louise's during the time of the murder. We're going to check his alibi."

  Tripp gathered up his files and stood. "Get to it then. Keep in touch with any new developments."

  Diana and Tripp left and I stood to pace around the room. Bodie waited until he heard the outside door slam before he looked at me. "Okay. Spill. What was Nelson doing at your house last night?"

  "That doesn't matter, because I know he didn't do it."

  "Are you sure?" Bodie's eyebrows knitted together.

  "Yes. I'm sure. I just need to prove it."

  I looked at the box of evidence laying on the table and remembered Claire's phone. I had brought my extra charger from home, but knowing how these guys were in the station house, that charger would be gone before lunch if I didn't mark it. "You got a Sharpie over there?"

  Bodie handed me a marker and I wrote my name on the charging cube that attached to the cable. Maybe once the phone charged up we would find another clue to exonerate Luke.

  Bodie was staring at me. "Why are you so sure he didn't do it?"

  I hesitated. I didn't want to tell him because I would put him in an awful position if, no when, Kirk found out I had not come clean about being with a suspect on the night of the murder. But I needed Bodie's help.

  I stared at my partner. "Luke is the God Among Men."

  "Holy Shit! Wysdom! You're his alibi! Why didn't you say anything?"

  "Because we were so drunk, I can't say for certain he was with me at the time of the murder. But I know he didn't do it."

  Bodie rocked back in his chair just as another hot flash rolled through me. I don't know why they're called hot flashes. Flashes are quick and these are anything but. It sometimes feels as a blanket of fire is being pulled up over my legs and chest. A hot, wet, wool blanket of craptastic fire. Although it sucked, it did give me an idea.

  "Bodie, I want you to call Vern Reddy and ask him if Claire was going through menopause," I patted him on the shoulder as I stood. "I need to go talk to Faith, and I'll meet you at the front door in a half hour."

  I took off for the morgue before he could say anything.

  ∞∞∞

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dr. Faith Jackson was explaining how autopsies work to a group of 15 high school students. Every year, she participates in Career Day where she allows students who are interested in forensics to shadow her. In every group, there are always two or three kids who are fascinated by the morbidity of it all and just want to see the dead bodies. They are usually the ones that turn green by this point in her presentation.

  Faith saw me enter the outer chamber and winked at me through the glass. There was too much glee in her smile as she said something, then started a "Y" incision on the chest. As if on cue, four of the students ran from the room, holding their hands over their mouths. A new record! Faith's crazy smirk got bigger and I laughed. She missed her calling. With blonde hair and blue eyes, she has the look of a cherub, but inside lurked a demon who knew exactly how to torture someone the quickest way possible.

  I sat at her desk and waited until she was finished with the students. She came through the door, drying her hands on paper towels.

  "Girlfriend! Long time no see!" She smiled.

  "We just saw each other on Saturday," I winked at her and got up out of her chair.

  Her office was neat as a pin. No stray papers. No stacks of books. She must secretly be a serial killer. No one is this tidy.

  "What can I do for you?" She bumped me in the hip before she sat down and pulled out a notepad.

  I sat down in her visitor's chair which was incredibly uncomfortable. She said she kept it that way so people weren't encouraged to linger. "I have a question."

  "Shoot."

  "How do you determine the time of death?" I asked.

  "The body cools one point five degrees for every hour after death. So, we take the temperature at the scene and subtract that from 98.6 degrees, the average temperature for a human being," she drew a formula on the notepad. "Then, divide that number by one point five. That tells us how many hours the person has been dead. Hence, the time of death."

  "What sorts of things would skew a time of death?" I asked.

  "Any number of things. Ambient temperature, the clothing the victim was wearing, humidity," she stopped and looked at me. "Why do you ask?"

  "What if the person's temperature was hotter than 98.6 degrees?"

  "That would mean the time of death was earlier than we thought."

  My stomach fluttered. An earlier time of death could mean I was Luke's alibi. But my excitement was short-lived when Faith went on: "But it's hard to prove someone didn't have a typical core temperature."

  "What about if a woman was going through menopause?" I pressed.

  "I suppose, and that's a big supposition. Typically the temperature only spikes if a woman is having a hot flash at the moment. And to change the ti
me of death, she would have to be having a hot flash the very moment she was killed."

  "Which brings us back to the problem of proving her temperature wasn't 98.6," I sagged in my chair.

  "Precisely!" She threw an arm in the air, pointing her finger in triumph as if we just solved a serial murder case. Her giant smile turned to a frown when she looked at me. "These are great questions that most detectives never ask, so why are you so glum, chum?"

  "Nothing. I was just crossing my t's and dotting my i's in this investigation," I stood and my phone buzzed. It was Tripp with a 911 text, telling me to get back to the squad room. "Gotta' go, the taskmaster is waiting.”

  ∞∞∞

  My brother wasn't one to get hysterical. If anything, I often wondered if we should check his insides to make sure he wasn't a robot, he was always so stoic. When I entered the squad room, every detective and officer were milling about and the noise level was deafening. Tripp was practically vibrating with excitement in the front of the room.

  "Listen up people!" He clapped his hands. No people were listening up, so I found Bodie.

  "What's going on? I got a 911 text to get back here," I asked him.

  "Dunno. They came rushing into the conference room and told me to get my ass out here, that there's a big break on Luke Nelson," Bodie didn't look me in the eye and my heart sank.

  Tripp tried to get everyone's attention again, but it was Kirk who got everyone to shut up when he blew a shrill whistle through his fingers.

  My brother looked at me and smiled. Smiled! I looked around for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I was sure the world was coming to an end.

  "We have discovered that Lucio Nelson is an alias for none other than a man named Lucio Saber," Tripp announced and I felt as green as those high schoolers in the morgue. "Saber is a former Marine, and much of his records have been redacted. We're pushing that through legal right now. But we believe we have a lead on the crime scene."

  Tripp nodded to Diana who pulled up a map on the big TV screen at the front of the room.

  "We know that Mr. Saber was last seen around 9:30 with a redhead at Bellissimo on the night of the murder," she pointed to a dot at the center of the map. "The time of death is midnight, and within that radius we found three self storage units that he rented in the last five years. We got warrants to search all three and we're going to hit them all at once."

  Tripp was going to lead the team to one location and appointed our younger brother Wynn to lead the team at the location farthest from us. I kept looking at the dot that was between Luke's house and the crime scene. I walked up to my brother and volunteered Bodie and myself to search that one.

  "Great idea, Sergeant Ward. You'll lead that team." My brother lightly punched me in the arm. I smiled, then tried to calmly but quickly walk to the restroom. I didn't make it into a stall, throwing up into the trash can right by the door.

  ∞∞∞

  Chapter Nineteen

  The manager of U-Stor-It was all too happy to see us. He listened to true crime podcasts and had a true crime app where people paid to look at augmented reality of crime scenes. He wanted to know if we were looking for any bodies, because "sometimes the place smelled like decomp".

  I rolled my eyes at the overweight, balding, middle aged man with Coke bottle glasses. I switched on Cop Mode and turned my laser focus on him. "How do you know what a decomposing body smells like?"

  He stammered and didn't have much else to say, so he led us to Luke's storage unit instead. He frowned at the locks. "That's strange."

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. "What's strange?"

  "There are two locks on this," he pointed to the cylinder lock inside the door and the high-tech padlock outside. "Most of our customers have one or the other. This guy has two. I can open the cylinder, because I have a master key. The padlock, you're on your own."

  "That's fine. Use the master key and step back," I motioned to another officer to take the manager out of the way after he opened the first lock. I looked down at the padlock.

  "That's a weird lock," Bodie said beside me.

  "It's designed so you can't cut it with bolt cutters. Thankfully, we brought something better," I nodded to another officer holding a hydraulic rescue tool, also known as the Jaws of Life.

  I covered my ears as he turned it on and stuck the ends in the small hole at the top of the padlock where it connected to the latch. At first, it didn't look like anything was happening, but within five minutes, the shank split enough that it slid off the latch of the unit. There was a blissful silence when the machine was turned off. The only thing I could hear was my heart pounding in my ears.

  "Bodie, do the honors," I directed and stood back with my hand on my weapon. I didn't think there'd be anything inside, but I had to be prepared.

  Bodie rolled up the door and flipped the light switch just inside the doorway. I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. There were wooden shelves all around the walls of the room, packed with weapons and boxes of ammunition.

  Bodie let out a low whistle.

  In the center of the room stood two sawhorses supporting what looked like a wooden door, creating a makeshift workbench. As I got closer, I noticed there were blueprints on the bench for a huge building, or maybe a bunker?

  Bodie snapped on latex gloves and picked up a piece of body armor. "Good lord, who is this guy? The Rock?"

  I grabbed my phone and took pictures of the scene, then flipped it to video mode, slowly turning around in a circle to get everything. About halfway through my turn, I saw a red blinking light at the back of the room. I stepped closer and realized it was a countdown clock, with twenty seconds left.

  "Everybody out! There's a bomb!" I screamed, pushing Bodie outside the unit, then pulling the door down behind us. We only got a few yards away when the explosion rocked the area. The concussion from the blast shoved us down to the pavement, where I hit my head. I sat up and looked around. Smoke billowed out of the unit and I couldn't hear a thing, my ears were ringing badly. Hands shook my shoulders and I looked up at Bodie. His eyes were wide and there was blood trickling down from his forehead from were a piece of shrapnel hit him.

  "ARE YOU OKAY?" He was yelling at me.

  No. I was decidedly not okay. What the hell is going on?

  "Oh my God! Tripp and Wynn!" I grabbed my phone to call them and warn them about the bomb.

  ∞∞∞

  Chapter Twenty

  I sat in the back of an ambulance, being looked over by a paramedic when Chief Dad arrived at the scene.

  "Wysdom! Are you okay?"

  "I have a concussion from hitting the ground, but other than that, yeah, I'm okay."

  Dad pulled me into a hug.

  "Where is she? Where's my niece?" I heard Uncle Dixon yelling at the officers securing the scene. He raced up to me wearing a t-shirt that said I'm the Wurst with a picture of a sausage on it. That made me laugh.

  "You're laughing, that's a good sign," Dix said, moving in for his own hug.

  "What happened?" Dad asked.

  "We were searching the storage unit of Lucio Nelson, a.k.a. Lucio Saber when the place blew up," I shrugged. "The bomb squad and arson investigators are in there now, finishing up their investigation."

  "Thank God no one was killed," Dix said.

  "That's the weird thing," I said. "The bomb wasn't really big enough to blow up the area, it looks like it was just enough to destroy the evidence inside. The unit had also been reinforced on all sides to prevent the ammunition from penetrating or the resulting fire from spreading."

  "It's a good thing you got ahold of your brothers before they breached the other units," Dad ran his hand down my arm. "The bomb squad found and diffused devices at the other locations."

  "Except this one is toast. Whatever evidence was inside is gone, gone, gone," I sighed. "I did take pictures and video of the place before it blew up. That might help."

  "Smart girl," Dix beamed.

  My dad
nodded. "But no way to determine if this was the Claire Rousseau crime scene."

  "Nope."

  "Tripp says they found no DNA at the other locations," Dad told me.

  "They didn't find Claire's DNA there?" I asked.

  "No. They found no DNA whatsoever. Nothing. It was like a clean room in there," Dad paused. "Who is this guy?"

  Dixon looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I gave a slight shake of my head. "Don't know. He had racks and racks of weapons and ammunition, along with body armor. Not the kind you can buy on Amazon either, this was military-grade stuff."

  Tripp jogged up us. It was turning into a regular family reunion. The only thing missing was a grill and a case of beer.

  "How you feeling, sis?"

  "Like I was blown up."

  He smiled at me then turned to Dad. "Chief, we have a problem. There's no evidence these lockers actually belonged to Lucio Nelson or Saber, or whatever his name was."

  A chill stole over my skin. "What does that mean?"

  "It means the only thing we have is the fact that the storage units are in his name. There's no video evidence. Every time each unit was accessed, the video was scrubbed from the system. Not just erased, but destroyed."

  "I know this is probably a long shot, but how did he pay for it?" Chief Dad asked.

  "He paid up front, two years in advance. Cash."

  "Who is this guy? Clint Eastwood?" My uncle gave me the Abreo Stare and I tried to ignore him.

  "So, the only thing we have is the name on the account. And the only reason we have that is because we found his identity through the Marine Corps," I squinted my eyes, thinking, but my concussion was making it hard.

  "We're still sifting through the weapons, but that doesn't seem to be linked to the murder of Claire Rousseau," Tripp said. "All of the weapons were unmarked. That will make this a federal case. ATF is on the way."

  I turned to my dad and Tripp, with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. "I... uh... need to tell you something, but you're not going to like it and I want you to hear me out before you start yelling."