Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon 2014 Anthology

by Patricia Abbott

  “Internal phone records show that late last night someone placed a call from the house phone by the tenth floor elevator to Mr. Devereux’s room. The call lasted just one minute. It wasn’t recorded but we’re sure it was Ms. Billingsley calling to tell her victim of the present on his door.

  “I should add that from reading through her novels we’ve learned that the accused is familiar with poisons and administering them, including the substance that has been determined to be the cause of the victim’s death. Chloral hydrate.”

  “Stan,” a man called from the back, “What was the motive?”

  “We believe Mrs. Billingsley learned that she was the runner up to the prestigious Tombstone award, given by the writers’ conference. She knew that if the intended recipient died before the ceremony, the honor would go to the next highest vote winner.”

  “Detective Mellers,” one woman reporter called, “has she made a statement?

  “She denies the charge and claims she was by herself at the time of the killing, walking on the beach, thinking up ideas for her next book. No witnesses saw her, though. We know she’s lying.”

  It was then that Handle cocked his head with a frown.

  “What is it, Jim?” Deborah Tailor asked, noting his expression.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He rose, and left the room, pulling his mobile out of the holster, where it sat next to his Glock 17.

  Fifteen minutes later, Deborah Tailor was growing bored with the press conference. She looked around. Jim Handle, whose wry humor and easy-going nature had been one of the high points of the conference so far, still had still not returned. She’d give it a few minutes more and then head up to the room.

  Standing out in the hoard of reporters, a blonde in a fiery red dress and clashing yellow scarf, asked stridently, “Stan, you actually think winning an award, especially one that has no cash prize, could be a motive for murder?”

  “Guess it was, Tiffany. Lookit what happened. We got a dead author.... These creative sorts. Big egos. Easy to get rubbed the wrong way.”

  Noting they were in the world of CNN speculation at this point, Tailor decided to leave and return to her room for a Kahlua and a streamed episode of House of Cards. She got as far as the door when two gunshots from inside the hotel, not far away, shook the walls and sent most of the attendees diving for cover.

  Del Rio, Mellers and the Hulk went into COPS mode. They drew their black weapons and headed out the door.

  Hot on their heels were the journalists, ditching caution and hoping against hope that the gunfire wasn’t over and that they could, for once, live up to the name plastered on their vans and videocams, “Eyewitness.”

  Jim Handle stood in the corridor outside the door to room 110 in the hotel attached to the convention center. He’d used a chair to wedge the self-closing door open.

  His grim face turned toward the lawmen, approaching.

  “I’ve cleared the room,” he called, noting their drawn guns. “Nobody else inside.”

  “What happened, Jim?” the sheriff asked. The three slipped their weapons back into the holsters.

  “Take a look.”

  Everyone stepped inside. A table was turned over and a man about thirty years of age lay on his back. He had two gunshot wounds—one in the chest and one in the middle of his forehead. A hipster fedora, spattered with blood, rested near the shattered head.

  Mellers asked, “Who is he?”

  “An attendee. A fan. His name’s Josh Logan. He’s from Portland.”

  The Hulk grunted, as if the man’s city of origin explained the carnage. Handle himself thought Oregon was a pretty nice place. He’d gone up there on a fishing trip more than a few times.

  “What’s the story?” Sheriff Del Rio was looking around the room, squinting, trying to figure it out.

  When Handle hesitated, Mellers said, “Well, Jim? Out with it.”

  Another pause. Then: “Fact is, Stan, I’m sorry, but I had a bit of a problem with your case against Mrs. Billingsley.”

  “Problem?”

  “I did.”

  “Go on, Jim,” Del Rio said.

  “Just didn’t sit right.”

  “What’re you talking about,” Mellers snapped. “The evidence’s all there. Hair, fingerprint, fibers, shoe print.”

  “He planted ’em.” A nod at the body.

  “But the print,” Mellers said testily. “How could he plant that?”

  Handle grimaced. “No, he didn’t. But that was on the door that all the attendees used to walk upstairs to the book sales room, if they didn’t want to wait for the elevators. Which sure take their time here.”

  Nodding, Del Rio asked, “He snuck into her room to steal the evidence. How?”

  “Here.” Handle used a tissue to lift a hotel room key card from the table. It was completely blank, unlike the ones issued to guests, which bore the hotel’s logo. “Dollars to donuts, it’s a master key. Stole it from the security office. There’s one missing. I asked.” Because there were guards nearby, he added in a whisper. “They’re not the most buttoned-up folk in the world.”

  Mellers remained defiant: “But the poison? Chloral hydrate. It was in her books. She knows what it does. How to administer it.”

  “Which tells us,” the sheriff snapped, “she wouldn’t use it as a murder weapons. Too obvious. But somebody who wanted to frame her might. Jim, assuming you’re right, how’d this boy come by it?”

  “I talked to Narcotics. You can buy chloral hydrate on the street; it’s not too strong, it’ll give you a high. You concentrate it, you’ve got a deadly poison.”

  Handle pointed to a hotplate and a small pan on the floor in the closet. A whitish residue crusted the sides and bottom.

  “I...uh,” Mellers said and then stopped trying.

  The Sheriff asked Handle, “Why’d you suspect him, Jim?”

  He didn’t look Mellers’s way as he said, “I haven’t been much included in the case, so it was a surprise when I heard Miss Billingsley didn’t have an alibi because she was walking on the beach at the time the poison was delivered. I called our tech people and they got in touch with her cell phone provider. She didn’t make any calls or sends texts around then, but her GPS showed she was on the beach.

  “Sure, it was possible she gave the phone to somebody to carry, to make it look like she was on the beach. But that wasn’t reason to give up looking for another suspect. I remembered yesterday this fan tried to give Devereux a manuscript. He got mad when he said no. I asked around and got his name.”

  “That’s him?” Del Rio asked. Another glance at the body.

  “Right. I came up here to talk to him. He didn’t want to let me in but I told him I’d get a warrant and that’d look worse for him. He agreed finally, but closed the door—like he was unhooking the chain—but he didn’t do it right away and I heard some noises inside. Like he was hiding something. When he let me in, first thing I did was open the closet door and saw the pan and hotplate and a copy of Mrs. Billingsley’s book. And her hairbrush, too....He grabbed that.” Handle gestured toward a steak knife, lying on the floor beside his hand. “He came for me.” A shrug. “He wouldn’t stop. I didn’t have much choice, Sheriff.”

  “It’s all right, Jim. You know the rules. Have to suspend you with pay for a couple days, while there’s an inquest. It’ll go fine.”

  “Sure, Sheriff.”

  Del Rio looked outside and noted that the reporters were hovering like frenzied baitfish. He said in a low voice, “You get to work on your statement now, Jim.” His eyes swiveled to Stan Mellers, who was looking everywhere but back at his boss. “And Stan, you and me, we need to talk.”

  At eleven p.m., Jim Handle was sitting outside the convention center on a bench facing the beach. The tide was coming in gracefully, the ocean still friendly.

  Handle had given up smoking years ago but he felt like a Marlboro at the moment. It had been that sort of day.

  His phone dinged with a text. It w
as from Becky.

  CONGRATS!!!!!!! Luv U!!!

  She was generally a pretty laid-back person but she could go hog-wild when she texted, her joy or anger given voice through punctuation and case.

  There was a reason for her enthusiasm at the moment. Her text was in response to one that he’d sent a few minutes ago. Handle had shared the subject of his most recent conversation with Sheriff Del Rio. Starting tomorrow, Jim Handle would be the new chief of the Detective Division of the Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Department. He would also be taking charge of the Susan Bennett murder case. His salary wouldn’t puff up very much, but that didn’t matter. Money never did, when you were doing what you loved, what you were meant to do.

  Good news all around.

  Everything going as he planned.

  So sorry, Stan, he thought to his former boss. You just weren’t cut out for the game.

  At least not playing against me.

  Handle nearly—but not quite—felt guilty setting Mellers up to arrest poor Edith Billingsley in front of both the audience and the carnivorous media. He thought back over the past twenty-four hours. He’d come up with an improvised but workable plot.

  He learned all about the writers’ conference and the people involved—the manuscript-toting fan Josh Logan, the jealous nominee authors, how the judging for the Tombstone worked and who the winner and the runner-up were. Then he planned out the next steps.

  On his dinner break last night he’d bought and read Billingsley’s novel to find a suitable means of murdering Devereux, one she’d be familiar with.

  Ah, perfect, chloral hydrate.

  Handle had stopped in the barrio and scored some from a gangbanger, then reduced it down to lethal strength and added it to the bottle of Glenmorangie scotch—Devereux’s favorite. He’d returned to the convention center to steal a master key from the laughably inept security staff. Then broke into Billingsley’s room to pick up some physical evidence—hairs, cosmetics, a pair of her shoes—to plant in and on the gift bag and the whisky bottle.

  Then, he’d left the bottle dangling from the author’s door, taken the elevator to Billingsley’s floor and called Devereux, saying he was the bell captain and had left a gift from the hotel on his door.

  Next, one dead author.

  Then, with a little guidance from Handle, even Stan Mellers could conclude Miss Billingsley was the culprit.

  As soon as the chief of detectives announced the arrest, Handle went to Josh Logan’s room, shot him, pressed a steak knife into his hand for the fingerprints and planted the hotplate and pan and the rest of the evidence.

  Success! The chief of detectives was gone. Jim Handle had his job.

  And, most important, he was at last safe.

  Now his eyes took in the scene before him tonight: the cool yellow moon’s fluttery reflection in the Pacific’s surface. Ah, so beautiful.

  Just like the night about a month ago, that moon nearly full, as well. The ocean, close to this calm.

  A perfect night.

  Handle recalled kneeling in the stern of his twenty-foot fishing boat.

  Seeing that delicate moonlight on the teak deck.

  On his bare arms.

  On the blade of the knife he gripped.

  On Sally Bennett’s naked, white body, so smooth, so pure. She’d been bound hand and foot, duct tape. Thrashing in terror, but not going anywhere.

  Handle had admired the light on her flesh for a few minutes more. Then he got to work. With her jaws taped shut, like Handle did with all his victims, Sally couldn’t muster any significant volume of screaming. This method of taping was one of many facts he’d learned from all his research into serial killers—a subject he studied so diligently not to catch predators but to avoid being caught.

  When this particular diversion was your hobby, you had to be just as informed as those who would pursue you.

  Evading detection was also why he’d married Becky. The profile of serial killers is that they are loners, rarely with spouses. So he’d found somebody pleasant enough to seem a suitable mate, insecure enough not to ask too many questions about his whereabouts when he took his “fishing trips” and eager to have kids (being a father pushes you further into the “no” column when cops analyze serial suspects).

  And if he wasn’t much aroused by her, that was no problem. Every few months he’d spend a day or two with a victim like Sally Bennett, and that would satisfy the great need within him.

  Then had come the close call—the inconsiderate school of fish gnawing through Sally’s rope, her body floating heavenward. Handle had been careful, but having the woman’s body was a terrible risk. He’d tried to get onto the case to destroy evidence and misdirect the leads, but Mellers wouldn’t cooperate.

  So Handle needed to destroy his career and replace him.

  Thank God the writers’ conference had come to town. It offered everything he needed.

  “Detective?” a woman’s voice cut through the night.

  It took all of Handle’s willpower not to jump. He turned slowly. His hand strayed to his Glock.

  Deborah Tailor walked slowly down the street-lamp covered sidewalk. She carried her shoes. She would’ve been walking on the beach.

  “Hi,” he said, relaxing.

  “Join you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nice tonight. The heat broke.”

  “Think the Santa Annas’re gone for the year. And no wildfires. We were lucky. So. All these writers’ conferences as exciting as this one?”

  She laughed. “Usually it’s mostly passive aggressive behavior we see. Not aggressive aggressive.”

  Handle noted her quick eyes, looking him over. She was sharp, observant. He hoped there wasn’t going to be a problem

  “Got a question for you,” she said after a moment.

  “What’d that be?”

  She asked, “You ever write anything?”

  “Write anything? Police reports is about all.”

  Tailor said, “I heard how you figured out Edith wasn’t the killer. And how you tracked down the real one.”

  “All in a day’s job.”

  “Interesting you mention that. It’s exactly what I’m thinking of.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Would you be interested in writing a series of first-person crime novels with somebody like you as the protagonist?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Nope. Not at all. You’ve got a voice.”

  “Voice?”

  “I don’t mean speaking voice. I mean thinking voice. A personality voice. What about it?”

  Handle laughed. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Though he was thinking: One of the aspects of serial killers—that research again, all those books—is that they avoid activities in which they’re public personalities. If he were to become a published author, that’d tamp suspicion down a bit further, after he went on his next fishing trip, which he was already looking forward to.

  Still, he had to be realistic. “I’ve got my college degree, but, fact is, I don’t know much about style and grammar and all that. English wasn’t my strong suit.”

  “You’d have copyeditors and proofreaders to handle that. The only thing they can’t help you with is plots.” Her eyes scanned his face once more. “But I have a feeling you’d be good at plotting, Detective Handle.”

  He considered this a moment, then said, “You know, I think I would, too.”

  “We have a deal?”

  And Jim Handle firmly shook her outstretched hand.

  Back to TOC

  Contributor Bios

  Patricia Abbott is the author of the ebook collections MONKEY JUSTICE, and HOME INVASION. CONCRETE ANGEL will appear summer 2015 with Polis Books. @pattinaseabbott | pattinase.blogspot.com

  Al Abramson is a man of few words; unfortunately you’ll find them in this anthology. When he isn’t abusing literature, he volunteers at Bouchercons.

  Roger Angle lives in greater Los Angeles, where he writes no
vels and short fiction about criminals, liars, con-men, and cheaters. You know, old friends. rogerangle.com

  Anthony Award nominee Craig Faustus Buck is an L.A.-based author/screenwriter. His noir novella PSYCHO LOGIC is at Bookxy.com and his novel, GO DOWN HARD, will be published by Brash Books in 2015. craigfaustusbuck.com | @CFBuck

  A denizen of Oregon, Bill Cameron writes the Portland-based Skin Kadash mysteries, including the Spotted Owl Award winning COUNTY LINE. bill-cameron.com | @bcmystery

  Award-winning author Dana Cameron writes crime fiction and urban fantasy. The third Fangborn novel, HELLBENDER, will be published by 47North in 2015. danacameron.com

  Prize-winning short-story writer Judith Cutler has written forty novels, most featuring feisty female protagonists. Her work has been broadcast and widely anthologized. http://judithcutler.com/

  Ray Daniel is the award-winning author of TERMINATED. Born in Boston, Ray graduated with honors from the UMass in computer engineering with a minor in English. raydanielmystery.com

  A former journalist, folksinger and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages. He’s the author of thirty-five novels, three collections of short stories and a nonfiction law book, and the lyricist of a country-western album. jefferydeaver.com

  Phillip DePoy author of the Flap Tucker mysteries, Fever Devilin novels, and upcoming Christopher Marlowe series, also won the Best Play EDGAR for EASY. phillipdepoy.com

  Sharon Fiffer is the author of the Jane Wheel mysteries published by Minotaur and co-editor of three anthologies of literary memoirs, HOME, FAMILY and BODY. sharonfiffer.com | @janewheel