Barbara Graham - Quilted 05 - Murder by Sunlight

by Barbara Graham

  Wade grinned. “Money still not growing on trees in Park County, is it? We could use the TBI resources.”

  “That’s true, but I’m not prepared to wait in line for this information. Carry on.”

  Quickly but carefully, Wade finished processing the front of the notebook, the back, the inside covers, and the most recent page used. Then he lined up his lifters, and using a magnifier, studied each in turn. “I’m only looking for something not consistent with the others.” Wade looked up. “Whether it’s Candy’s or not, I’m not prepared to say, but whoever handled this was the only person leaving fingerprints on it.”

  “Okay, that’s a start.” Tony pointed to the stack of envelopes.

  Wade finished both sides of the first envelope, made his notes, and passed it to Tony.

  Tony took the envelope in his gloved hands and slit the top open. Pushing the slit wider with tweezers he saw cash. Not unexpected. “Do you want to fingerprint the money too?”

  Wade hesitated. “We’re possibly going to get lots of matches to the mail carrier on the ones with stamps. But, so many people touch money and . . .”

  “Just do the envelopes, front and back,” Tony said. “We’ll just hope it’s not the wrong decision.”

  “You know, if the mailman killed her, his fingerprints will be on the envelope.” Wade’s perfect teeth flashed in his handsome face. “I’m just saying.”

  “I think I saw that movie too.” Ruth Ann shifted on her chair.

  Wade pointed to the stack of envelopes. “Ah, but most of these were hand delivered. No stamps.”

  “Open a few, and let’s see if something inspires us.” Tony absently wondered if Candy had moved on to committing a federal crime. If she had, he could hand the case and all the evidence over to someone else. A man could dream.

  “These have different amounts of cash. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, and three hundred.” Wade carefully dusted each envelope, and Tony divided them into categories according to the amount of money inside.

  “Red Dog, Blue Cow,” Tony studied the envelopes. “It’s like some weird spy game.”

  “Some envelopes don’t have names on them.” Wade continued his work.

  Ruth Ann said, “Do one of those next. I’m dying to know what’s inside. Not even a really stupid person would pay blackmail and not make sure they got credit for it, would they?”

  Tony felt his eyebrows lift. “Never overestimate the lack of brains or sense in this world. After recently having someone die ‘surfing’ on a pickup, I’m thinking the sky’s the limit on idiocy.”

  Wade handed Tony another envelope to open. Nothing was written on the outside of it.

  “This one has the donor’s code name paper clipped to the cash.” Tony handed it back. “You’ll want to do the note.”

  One envelope held the expected cash and a note. This one was pretty straightforward and echoed Tony’s opinion. “I’m paying you, but I’m not playing your dumb spy game.” It was signed, “Claude Marmot.”

  Claude Marmot was the closest thing to an expert on Candy’s blackmail that they knew about. Tony and Wade decided to talk to him away from the crime scene and prying neighbors. Out at the dump, Claude was busy welding a roundish car shell onto motorcycle bits.

  Tony saw no way it would work, but Claude had transformed an old Crown Victoria into a serviceable pickup; why not attach a cover to a two wheeler?

  “Sheriff? Wade? I’ll be with you in a minute. Why don’t you two take a load off?” Claude smiled and waved them to the former rear seat of some vehicle now arranged in the shade near his project. He waited until they were settled before continuing his welding.

  Tony watched Marmot-the-Varmint work. His hands were small for the size of his arms and obviously possessed great tensile strength. He squeezed the parts together with one hand while manipulating a drill with the other. Before releasing it, he slipped a bolt through the holes and finished with a flourish. Then he stepped back with a wide grin lighting his face. “Awesome.”

  Tony cleared his throat. “We’d like your help.”

  “No kidding.” Claude wiped his hand on his jeans. “It’s about Candy, I’ll bet.”

  “It is.” Tony glanced at the ground and up again, considering his next question. “When you dropped off your payment for Candy, did you always place it in the box?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you ever see anyone else placing money in the box?” Tony leaned back on the seat. “Or did you have any knowledge of others who were making payments?”

  Claude looked uncomfortable. “I might have some ideas but nothing you’d call proof.”

  “People you saw there?”

  “No. I never saw nobody.” Claude crossed his arms over his chest. “I wasn’t the only man in Candy’s life back then. I’ll reckon she never lacked for dates, even with married men.”

  “She was just a girl.” Wade frowned. “Sixteen.”

  “That’s so. She didn’t act like a girl. Don’t forget, I was a lot younger in them days too.” Claude frowned and rubbed the stubble on his face. “I’m not sure I was shaving yet and I’m not sayin’ it was right. I’m just sayin’ that’s the way I recall it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  “I’ve got a complaint from a Mr. O’Hara about the aroma of the pig farm next to them.” Rex’s voice carried through the telephone, speaking loud enough so everyone in the office could hear him.

  Tony thought Rex sounded like he was ready to laugh out loud. “And what do you know about this situation that is so amusing?”

  “The pig farm in question has been in its current location for at least twenty-five years. The new property developers planted a living fence of poplar trees to disguise the situation.” Rex continued, “I live a couple of miles away and am usually upwind of the pigs unless the weather is changing. Believe me, a few trees do not create a good disguise.”

  Ruth Ann giggled. “Why would anyone think a few trees are going to eliminate the aroma of pig poop during the heat of the season?”

  Tony would have been amused himself if he thought that the argument between the pig farmer and the property owners would be settled in a peaceable manner. “Is this a new situation?”

  “No, sir, but from what I gather, it is of grave concern to a new resident out there. He’s threatening to shoot all of Mr. Henry Rankin’s porkers.” Rex’s voice returned to its normal professional tone. “I tried to diffuse the situation on the phone, but I think someone with a badge ought to pay them a visit. I’d hate to have this escalate.”

  Tony knew Wade was still tied up with the fingerprint project. “Tell Mike to go now. I’ll be out later.”

  Besides being a smart, capable deputy, Mike and his bloodhound, Dammit, comprised the county canine unit. But more importantly in this situation, Mike also had a black belt in aikido. Tony thought it might be nice to have Mike’s special skills at hand when he interviewed the irate resident and Mr. Rankin, the pig farmer. Other than diffusing the argument, there really wasn’t much he could do. The pigs were there first, and they were a fair distance from town. Unless the homeowner was prepared to buy the pig farm, so to speak, he was stuck.

  The name O’Hara was jiggling something in his brain but he couldn’t place it. Too much excitement of late and too little sleep. He thought he should identify it before heading to the farm.

  Mrs. Fairfield.

  “Sheriff?” The muffled voice on the other end of the call was one Tony had become all too familiar with in the past few days. The pathologist assigned to do the autopsy of Candy Tibbles had the unfortunate name, Dr. Death. Actually, his last name was Deaton, but no one used it, including the doctor. He was as wide as he was tall and had a flair for telling jokes. “I’ve got a cause of death for your Ms. Tibbles.”

  “What killed her?” Tony guessed blood loss but was not qualified to make the call.

  “Sunlight.” Death waited, presumably for a reaction. He didn’t wait long.

/>   “Excuse me?” Tony said. “Sunlight?” For a moment he wondered if the doctor was telling a joke, but as macabre as the man could be, he was all about having justice for the dead. “How is that possible?”

  “Ms. Tibbles suffered a terrible blow to the back of her head. Cracked the skull, and you know how head wounds like to bleed. A bit melodramatic, if you ask me. Well, anyway, she was undoubtedly knocked out cold, and the dirt boys will have their own job figuring out the blood loss.”

  Tony started to wonder if the man was being paid by the word instead of the body.

  “I’ve examined Ms. Tibbles, and I’ve studied the photographs of your scene,” Dr. Death said. “I’m going to say she would probably have survived if she had been hauled out of the greenhouse and into the fresh air. She would have needed a hospital to get that head fixed up, but your woman was baked to a crisp. Freshly sunburned where she lay. I can show you. It’s not a lot of sunburn because she died fairly quickly, but it’s there.”

  “When you say she might have lived if she was pulled outside,” Tony said, “are we talking seconds, minutes, or hours?”

  “Well, the sooner the better. I’d say minutes.” Deaton must have shuffled some papers into the receiver and it created a terrible racket, then stopped. “When whoever pulled the tarp back and exposed her to the midday sun, they killed her as sure as if they’d shot her in the head. The angle of the sun and the missing tarp put her face in the direct path of the light. Hence the sunburn. Living bodies are not happy in ovens.”

  “So the manner of death is homicide?” Tony asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Death said. “Excellent question, Sheriff. I believe you’re getting the hang of this business. By the way, good luck with the upcoming election. I’ve met your opposition, Mr. Barney, and I can’t say I think he’d be an asset to any department. I’ll bet he can’t even cut his own meat much less run an investigation into missing chicken drumstick at Sunday dinner.”

  “Thank you, Dr. D.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  Tony hated to question the boy. Alvin had been back from plant camp for only a few minutes. He had called Tony’s office for a ride home when Candy Tibbles’s remains had been returned for burial. After a short visit with the undertaker, Calvin Cash-dollar, Alvin was delivered for a visit with Tony.

  “Blackmail?” Alvin Tibbles looked bewildered. “Why would people pay her?”

  “For the usual reasons.” Tony didn’t think the boy was really taking in the whole situation. He looked ten years older than he had when Tony visited him at plant camp. “People will pay to keep people from finding out something potentially illegal or embarrassing.”

  “I’d have paid too, some days, if she’d have promised to tell people she lied about being my mom and said she had kidnapped me from a normal family. I knew she couldn’t really help herself, but some things she did were more awful than others.” A flash of humor lit the boy’s wan expression. “Did you know she told me your aunt owed her big bucks and wouldn’t pay? I didn’t understand what she meant at the time or why your aunt would owe her anything.”

  “Any idea what for?” Tony could imagine his aunt getting into an argument with Candy, especially if there was a student of hers involved. He could not quite wrap his mind around his aunt having any secret worthy of cash payments. Not even the fifty-dollar variety.

  “I asked Mom.” Alvin shook his head. “She said I should stay out of it, and I told her to leave your aunt alone.”

  Not for the first time, Tony found himself feeling sorry about the burden the boy carried. Children should not have to take care of their parents, at least not until they were adults, certainly not when they were still in school. “Your mom has a notebook where she apparently checked off monthly payments. Some appeared to be only once-a-year items, but there are only code names. Did she have a great memory?”

  “Not even close.” Alvin started laughing. “She loved the whole idea of spies and having secret codes. We played secret agent games all the time when I was little. Before my grandparents died, she was irresponsible, but she could be kinda fun.” His laugh trickled away, turning into obvious grief.

  “So the names she assigned each person probably mean something? Were they based on initials? You know, maybe switching Triceratops Aardvark for Tony Abernathy kind of thing?”

  “Not necessarily.” Alvin gulped back threatening tears.

  Tony hated having to ask the boy these questions. “We can do this later.”

  “No.” Alvin remained in his chair. “Did you find the code book?”

  “There’s a code book?” Tony felt like slapping himself. No wonder it had seemed so easy. Easy even for Candy on one of her bad days. “What does it look like?”

  “It’s this little pink book, with a white kitten on the cover.” Alvin’s hands shook as he indicated something about the size of a deck of cards. “When we played spy, she kept it in her pocket so she could reach it and interpret her code. I had to help her set it up, but she coded everything for years. I’m sure she couldn’t come up with another one on her own. She wanted to be a spy.”

  “Do you know where she kept it after you stopped playing the game?”

  Alvin nodded. “She keeps it under her pillow.”

  “Either Candy has changed her hiding place, or someone else beat us to it.” Wade frowned. He’d checked every bed in the house, had been through the covers inch by inch, inside the pillow cases and under the bed where he’d had to fight through monster dust bunnies. Nothing.

  “I’m calling Vince. Maybe the TBI boys have it.” Tony wasn’t on hold for very long when the answer came. No. None of them had found the code book. It would have been bagged, tagged, and on the list they’d given him.

  “Did you read the list?” Vince’s words burned through the telephone.

  Tony had. He had also heard the undertone of righteous indignation in Vince’s voice.

  Tony apologized profusely for his ever even considering such an improbable scenario and heard himself promising to never imply such a thing again. “I was desperate and not thinking clearly.”

  Only his offer to buy the whole team dessert the next time they had to explore a crime scene in Park County soothed them. The responding comment about the probability of their being needed again fairly soon in the crime center of Tennessee, he let pass without comment. He deserved the backlash.

  “You know, for such a messy house, there’s nothing in the trash cans.” Wade returned from his search of the upstairs. “Either she never even threw away the cardboard center from a roll of toilet paper, or someone collected all the garbage about the time she died.”

  “Claude.” Tony liked the trash hauler, but he didn’t like the way his name keep coming up in their investigation. He also thought Wade might be adding one and one and coming up with three but he was grasping at straws himself. “He could have taken the code book and the trash out to the dump.”

  Wade shook his head. “He signed his name, so we know he made the most recent month’s payment.”

  “True. I’m not saying Claude knew about the code book. The killer could have slipped it into the trash to protect his—or her—identity, knowing Claude would probably pick it up before anyone knew she was dead. Once it arrived at the dump, it would be next to impossible to find.”

  “You think the killer came into the house after bashing her in the head and threw it away?” Wade looked out the window and down the driveway where the trash would have been placed. “There’s a lot of people who could see someone, not Candy, putting something in her garbage in broad daylight.”

  “If I thought there was any chance the notebook would connect me to a murder,” Tony mumbled as he chewed absently on an antacid, “I’d take it with me, rip the pages out, and run them through a paper shredder.”

  Wade said, “I might just rip out the page that listed my code name and leave the book in place. But if I was really smart, I’d leave it alone and be interviewed
with all the other names in the book. It’s the blackmail payer who is not in the book I’d like to talk with.”

  Tony sighed. “We have so many theories, they have their own zip code.”

  “If you’ve got your heart set on digging through the stuff I col-lected”—Claude stared out at the pits and piles in the dump—“I do have a master plan.”

  “So you can suggest a general area where we should search.” Tony squinted against the blinding light reflecting from a piece of mirror. The hot garbage gave off a powerful aroma. He did not want to do this.

  “Yep.” Claude walked toward a medium-high pile. “This is the most likely area. You’ll know if you start finding Kwik Kirk’s on napkins and bags, it’s probably near Candy’s stuff. She doesn’t generally have much more than a black plastic bag or two. Not like the couple with the baby. They make up for Candy with all those diapers.”

  “Do you have a shovel we can borrow?” Tony walked along the edge of the pile, hoping to see a bag from Kwik Kirk’s on top.

  “Yessir.” Claude ambled off and returned with two shovels, two pairs of work gloves, and a gallon jar of water and two chipped cups. “Have at it.”

  It didn’t take Tony long to decide he didn’t enjoy digging in garbage. The stench was amazing. He’d never imagined this aroma, plus the sound of flies. He’d have opened his mouth to complain but was afraid the bugs would fly in. Nasty. A glance at Mike, who was filling in for the fingerprint-occupied Wade, showed another unhappy man. Dammit lounged in the shade of a massive magnolia tree by the house. The bloodhound looked quite comfortable.

  About the time Tony was ready to call a halt to their search, Mike found a couple of black bags surround by Kwik Kirk’s trash. Opening them crushed their excitement. Lots of empty chip bags, plastic pop bottles that should have been recycled, and an exceptionally revolting collection of chicken bones.

  No book.