Detective Hughes’ eyes broadcasted the struggle within him, hovering somewhere between reproach and worry. “You’ve certainly been enterprising with these unofficial investigations of yours. So you’re saying they could have killed Oscar to keep him quiet?”
“It’s a possibility. They were certainly willing to kill me. But I don’t know … Frank confessed everything he did when he panicked, and he didn’t mention Oscar’s murder.”
“That’s not exactly a testimonial to innocence, Liam.”
“Is … Is there something we can do, Detective? I … I’m scared.”
Detective Hughes stood. His eyes softened for a moment. “Okay, give me a minute.” He picked up his telephone receiver. “Lou? It’s Tony. Can you check those archives of yours and tell me what you know about a man named Morley? Uh-huh … uh-huh … That bad, huh? Suspicion of murder? I see. And an outstanding warrant. That certainly makes things easier. Thanks, Lou.” He hung up. “Looks like this Morley is a nasty character. You must have just scraped by with your life. We’ll send officers out to your place to check. And you can stay until we get word back from them.”
Li melted from exhaustion and relief.
Detective Hughes studied the hurt and terrified boy. “Now Liam, I have to insist you stop snooping. You could have been killed today. Why do you insist on putting your life in danger? Why are you trying to hunt down a murderer?”
That perked Li up. “Because there’s a friend of mine who is frightened and regrets the mistake he made. Reuben did not kill Oscar. All he did was leave that package. He didn’t hurt anyone. In fact, I think, when Oscar died, Reuben was working with me. But he doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him. He’s sinking into remorse and that could hurt him and his boyfriend worse than any physical pain. I can’t let him suffer. Not after he saved my life.”
His eyes glinted like twin pools of winter ice.
Detective Hughes pushed out a frayed sigh. “Liam, I don’t want you to get killed. It’s dangerous.”
“Have you learned anything new about Oscar’s—?”
“No.” That one word carried the force of a million bullets.
“Detective—”
“No. No more questions. Never again.”
Li wanted to protest when Adam poked his head into the cubicle. “Hey, Tony. I managed to trace the doctor Kathryn saw after the Bauer incident. Apparently, she went to Los Angeles to see him, which is why I never got a line on what made her sick.” Detective Hughes tried to signal to Adam to keep quiet, but the Wolf was too keen on the scent. “She saw an allergy specialist.”
Li’s eyes swelled as if he just saw the fabric of reality tear open. He ran his fingers through his short black hair, his habit when disparate ideas and images were slamming together in his head. The stormy night. The coat. The collar. The move. The resignation. The dinner. The grocery store. The list in the lining of his pocket. The cane. The missing groceries. And Oscar’s personality.
All the puzzle pieces formed a neat and tidy picture.
Li started to mutter. “That’s it. Oh my God, that’s it! That explains everything!”
Detective Hughes and a shocked and chastened Adam stared at him.
“Um, Liam? Is everything okay?”
Li jerked to his feet and drilled his laser-bright eyes into the detective’s face.
“Oscar Lindstrom planned to murder his wife.”
“It fits. It all fits.”
Li sank back into his chair, almost dazed by his own revelation. The two policemen shared a look that suggested they wanted to summon a special kind of doctor for Li. The kind with a soothing tranquilizer.
Detective Hughes cleared his throat. “Liam? Do you mind illuminating us on this theory of yours?”
“It’s not a theory, Detective. It can’t be. It has to be the truth.” A sober, mature determination set his jaw and strengthened the conviction in his eyes. “All along, we were confused by how Oscar was in two places at the same time. It seemed, didn’t it, that two stories were tangled together. And there were two stories. Oscar’s plans and the plans of the person who killed him.
“Oscar had two core tenets of his personality. Firstly, he was a perfectionist. After his first wife, the wife he loved most of all, passed away, he became obsessed with finding the perfect mate to replace her. He married Constance because she was efficient, organized, and detail-oriented, making her a generally faultless commander. But he didn’t care for her independence. Hence their eventual divorce. Oscar wanted a wife who would wait on him hand and foot, a Stepford wife. And in Kathryn Lindstrom, he found what he wanted. He believed she was flawless.
“But we forgot about the second tenet of his personality: Oscar was a critic. Like I said before, a critic to his soul. Criticizing people brought him happiness. He loved finding the flaws in everything around him. He would tell his son ‘perfection can be perfected.’ Perfection was an ideal to strive for, but not something anyone could achieve. That would give him billions of opportunities to point out the faults of the world. Until he met Kathryn. He believed her to be the perfect woman.
“And you know what happened? She annoyed him! Because he was unable to satisfy that second key factor of his personality. He wanted to criticize her, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with her. So he grew more and more irked by her presence. Eventually, he settled on the idea of eliminating her from his life. Sounds like an old adage, doesn’t it? Those who find perfection are often dissatisfied.”
Detective Hughes interrupted. “So he decided to kill her? That’s hideous. That’s insane. Why not get a divorce?”
“Because Kathryn would never leave him. She adored Oscar, truly and deeply. Kathryn Lindstrom is a mothering soul who wanted a man to take care of, to spoil, to coddle, to baby. She didn’t want to be a wife, so much as a nursemaid or mother. In Oscar, she found a man she could coddle and care for, and I think she wouldn’t dream of divorcing him. And Oscar knew that. Plus I think Oscar might have gotten a horrible kick out of devising the ‘perfect’ crime. Another chance for him to assert his idea of ‘superiority.’” Li grimaced. “Disgusting, isn’t it?”
A frown tugged at Detective Hughes’ lips. “Completely. But I still can’t see how he devised this murder.”
Li’s eyes glossed over as he delved into his imagination and memories, drawing up vivid pictures of what he believed happened. “It started when Kathryn got sick at Bauer. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her.” He nodded at Adam. “You said she saw an allergy specialist, and that’s when it hit me. Kathryn Lindstrom is allergic to white pepper. Violently allergic, I’d say. And I don’t think she knew she was allergic until she ate the white pepper sauce on her dish during that last dinner at Bauer. No one at the restaurant learned what happened because she saw a doctor in LA, and by then it was too late. Oscar destroyed them, but silently held on to the knowledge of his wife’s allergy.
“Do you see where I’m going with this? After they learned the truth, Kathryn would eliminate white pepper from the house. When Oscar decided to murder her, he realized her deadly allergy could leave him virtually blameless if he planned properly. But he had to get white pepper. Hence the visit to a grocery store. Remember the grocery list he had? There was the entry G-W-P for ground white pepper.
“And think about where his body was found! Crouched by the pepper section of the spice aisle.”
The detective raised his hands. “All right, all right … Granted if all of that is true, how on Earth did he think he would get away with it?”
“His enormous ego probably made him believe he couldn’t make a mistake and that the crime was infallible.” He rolled his eyes. “In any case, he planned carefully. He studied many stores before settling on Esther’s Family Grocery, satisfied with it probably because it’s not the most secure or high-tech supermarket in the world. Then he began cutting off all ties in town. Submitting his résumé to other newspapers. Buying a new house. Resigning from his old post. Getting r
eady for a big getaway, I’d wager. I wonder … was he planning to write a fourth book? Do you know anything about that, Detective? A synopsis, a title, anything?”
“He planned to call it Clean Plate.”
Li clapped his hands once. He beamed. “That’s it! A clean plate! Or better yet, a clean slate. Oscar wanted to start over, to take his life in a new direction. So he decided to clean his plate, ending with getting rid of the woman who had started to irritate him.
“The list of groceries might have been his one moment of criminal vanity. Hiding the murder weapon in plain sight, so to speak. Burying the truth in a pile of nonsense. Laughing at the cops maybe. He probably even left the list lying around, overly confident in his plans. Jason told me how his father had a bad habit of leaving evidence of his affairs lying around his office, preening that no one was that observant. So why not thinly concealed evidence of his planned murder? Then he set the wheels in motion. He waited for the perfect night—cloudy, no moon. He announced to his family his intention to stay in his office, went to said office and placed that silhouette of himself in the window to give him an alibi, slipped on a big coat with an upturned collar to hide his face, and then snuck out when everyone else was occupied, leaving his trademark cane behind. He wanted to stay inconspicuous. He walked to Esther’s Family Grocery and went immediately to the spice aisle. His sole purpose was to acquire his murder weapon, which explains why he didn’t have any other groceries with him.”
Adam jumped in. “And just as he was crouching down to grab the pepper, someone killed him.” He blushed when his superior glanced at him.
Li nodded. “Exactly. And that’s where Oscar’s murderous plans came to an end and another’s continued to work.” He tented his fingers, his eyebrows knitted together. “Oscar’s plans do manage to clear away some of the clues, but not all of them. Like the bag of sugar on the floor near his body. Or the scanner in the toilet. Or the fact no one saw anything amiss that night.”
Detective Hughes, who had been taking covert notes while Li spoke, posed a question. “Do you have any interesting theories about that, Liam?” Just a shade of scorn worked into his tone.
Adam drummed nervous fingers on Detective Hughes’ desk. “Um … I think I have an idea, Tony. Since he was killed trying to get a murder weapon, maybe someone killed him specifically to stop him from getting that weapon.”
“Then it could possibly be Jason Lindstrom. He did love his stepmother.”
Li’s eyes snapped into focus. He jolted in his seat. “Wait! What?”
A smile unfurled across the detective’s dark chocolate skin. “Something you’ve missed, Liam? I noticed that Jason had an affection for his young stepmother. An affection far more serious than—”
Li shook his head. “No way. He didn’t love her. He hated her. Perhaps hated her more than Oscar.”
The smile died. “What was that?”
“Jason hates Kathryn. A lot. Because she never stopped his dad’s abuse. She just stood there and watched Oscar torture his son without stepping in to stop him. She was an apathetic bystander, most likely because Jason was not her own child, therefore not her responsibility. Jason loathed her, because she never helped him. But he was conflicted because she never did anything outwardly to hurt him. She was motherly and kind and never lifted a finger against him. That’s what Jason meant when he told me that ‘Kathryn wouldn’t hurt someone like that.’ That is, by violence. She’d hurt people by simply ignoring them when they needed help. So whenever he blushed or became awkward about her, it was because he had trouble reconciling his anger at her neglect and her sweet, generous nature. I imagine he wouldn’t be too upset if she died … or, at the very least, disappeared from his life altogether.”
The detective scowled. “Well, there goes another theory. You’re certainly adept at making them and discrediting them, aren’t you, Liam?” He drove his chin forward. “The trouble is that we still don’t have a solid piece of evidence as to who killed Oscar. Not a single clue. Not even you have a name to put to the murderer, Liam, and you seem to burst with ideas.”
Li’s brow pleated with a tight frown. His gaze was remote. His brain churned through the information, winnowing away the answers they had and focusing on the remaining questions. A pattern emerged, rising from the mess of this mystery. Li’s silvery-blue eyes shone like dawn on a misty morning.
Why did no one notice anything amiss that night?
How did the bag of sugar get involved?
What was the story of the fatal scanner?
Who murdered Oscar Lindstrom?
Li thought he knew.
“I have an idea who it must be, Detective. But you need evidence. If you look closely, you should be able to find it. Because the key to this whole mystery is that Oscar is the only victim. There were no more dangers after he was killed. Once he was dead, our murderer’s agenda was completed. This wasn’t a murder out of selfish greed, but out of charity, so to speak.”
“Charity?”
“Yes. And I think if we told one particular person the truth, our killer will come quietly.”
The suspect wasn’t at home. Li, riding along, suggested they try the Lindstrom house.
Kathryn met them in the foyer, ever-present apron around her waist, broom in hand. But her eyes were nonplussed. “Li? Detective? What’s this about?”
When asked, she revealed the suspect was upstairs in Oscar’s office, an interloper in his private kingdom, helping Kathryn pack away her husband’s belongings.
While the police informed Kathryn about their intentions, Li crept up the stairs. Inside the office, Li saw the murderer bury Oscar’s books inside a box. The murderer turned to face Li, expression baffled. “Um … can I help you?”
“It’s over.”
There was no mistaking the import of those words. They were heavy and filled the room with echoes, the last gong of a funeral bell. The murderer flinched, eyes wary. Then they sank into nothingness, a blank stare.
“I see. Does … Does she know?”
A heartbroken cry answered from downstairs. The wail of a wounded widow.
The murderer sighed. “That answers that, then. I did my best.”
Footsteps on the landing. The office door slid open, and Detective Hughes, his face an official mask of duty, sauntered inside the room. His voice held the weight of centuries of combined police tradition.
“Tom Delancey, you are under arrest for the murder of Oscar Lindstrom.”
CHAPTER 17
Beginning, Middle, and End
“Li, you have to tell us everything! What happened?”
It had been a few weeks since the arrest. Li sat on a chair in Reuben and Noah’s apartment with his two friends. Fernando Rodriguez and Sarah Johanson, a lively young woman in a bold summer dress and a sheer rainbow scarf wrapped around her bald head, had joined them. Both couples were snuggling in their respective seats, that near shave with the law still fresh in their heads. Li had been staying with Reuben and Noah while he was a witness in the trial against Frank Dixon, John Morley, and Constance Henderson. Just until the nightmarish ordeal was over.
The police found Morley lying in wait at Li’s apartment. He had been loaded with enough weapons to furnish a grassroots militia. On his arrest, he sold out Constance without batting an eyelash. At the same time, Juliana Esposito released her real article about the mayor, shattering his reputation and any future campaigns. It had been several weeks of scandal and upheaval, so much so that Oscar Lindstrom’s murder nearly vanished from public view.
But not from police view. Tom Delancey confessed everything and was currently making a home for himself in prison.
“Come on, Li!” Noah insisted, his arms wrapped stoutly around Reuben’s waist. “Quit stalling. How did you figure it out?”
Li, shy before his audience, quelled the urge to shuffle his feet, since they were still bandaged from that Hail Mary sprint. “Well, you see, it turned out to be just like I thought earlier. Kathryn Lindstrom
was the beginning, middle, and end of this murder.”
“How so?”
“She was the motive. Tom Delancey loved Kathryn, loved her with all his heart. It was as simple as that. There always seemed to be a close bond of friendship between Tom and Staci and the Lindstroms, despite their insistence that Oscar had no one in his life he considered a friend. So why would they associate with the Lindstroms? Since Oscar didn’t care for others, Jason didn’t have friends, and Staci seemed to be nothing more than a temporary fling, who did that leave? Tom knew Kathryn. We could even trace their friendship back further. Kathryn said she lived in Northern California. Tom used to write for the San Francisco Chronicle. I think Tom met Kathryn in San Francisco and fell madly in love with her. But she didn’t love him, because she wanted a man she could mother. When she married Oscar and moved to Shorewood, he followed her, unwilling to lose her.
“I think the biggest clues came from Jason Lindstrom. He described Tom as ‘the perpetual bachelor’ complete with beer signs and singing bass. Rather stereotypical, don’t you think? Like overcompensation, an assertion that he was a bachelor rather than a man pining for a woman. But the clue I like best is the position of his house.”
“His house?” Reuben asked. “What do you mean?”
“I’m mostly referring to his front window. It had an okay view of Oscar’s office window, but its best view was of Kathryn’s flower beds. I saw those flowers as the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby gazing at the dock of the faraway woman he loved. I believe it was a similar experience for Tom Delancey, a chance to see Kathryn from afar. He bought that house to be as close to her as he could.”
Sarah laced her delicate fingers with Fernando’s solid ones. “If it hadn’t led to so much pain, it could have been romantic. How did it all end with murder?”
Li nodded to her boyfriend. “That’s where Fernando was a big help.” Fernando looked like Li had accused him of being Kathryn in disguise. “He remembered that there were three people at the table when Kathryn got sick. One was Oscar. Another was Kathryn. The third wasn’t Jason, because he didn’t go to these dinners. So the third person at that dinner knew about Kathryn’s allergy to white pepper. Kathryn would have told him. I inferred that it was Tom Delancey. He often had dinner with his colleague; more chances to spend time with the woman he loved, I’d wager.
Cleanup on Aisle Six Page 20
