The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  Methodically, Claudia moved through each room. She went through every closet, every cabinet, every drawer. She looked through an old family album. She flipped through the pages of romance novels tucked here and there, hoping something would flutter out. And though she’d done it before, she groped beneath cabinet bottoms, table bottoms, the down side of any surface to which something important might have been secretly taped.

  What she wanted was something that didn’t fit, and she found it in the bathroom forty minutes later.

  Nothing jumped out immediately. That was the stuff of television drama. Claudia’s cursory inspection showed what she remembered: A half-empty bottle of Bayer Aspirin; Kaopectate; a box of Band Aids; a sampler bottle of Scope; Dactril; Triaminic; Sudafed; Maalox; dental floss; a Bic shaver; three nail polishes; cheap vitamins high in vitamin C; a dated prescription for an expectorant. Not much else.

  But the cabinet itself—how could she have missed it? One of four screws that held the cheap box to its recessed wall compartment was missing. The three that remained appeared loose and scarred, as if a screw driver had fiddled at them often.

  Why would that be?

  Claudia looked closer. Minute shavings from around the screw holes dusted the compartment. She straightened. A red flag and she’d missed it.

  It took some doing, but the screws were loose enough that with just her fingers Claudia was able to remove them. She placed them on the bathroom sink. Then she took the medication out and put them to the side as well. The cheap cabinet itself pulled free from its cavity as easily as a rotted tooth from a socket.

  Hello. Stashed in the recess, which had been crudely enlarged, were tidy two-inch by two-inch plastic bundles of a white powdery substance that Claudia figured for cocaine. Beside it were a dozen toy balloons. She opened one and carefully poured out a powder with a slight brown tint. Heroin. Had to be. Maybe imported from Mexico.

  Well, Chief Suggs, here’s your drug source, Claudia thought grimly. Here, Mary Curtell, here’s your ash. And here, she reluctantly told herself, was a damned fine reason for Tom Markos to kill the Reverend Donna Overton. The resourceful ex-con had probably been running an operation from her house. What a perfect set-up for a man whose own home would always be a favorite target for police.

  Maybe Overton knew, and Markos was feeding her money—all those neat cash deposits—to keep quiet. Maybe she’d gone along, then got nervous. Maybe they’d had an argument, and she’d threatened him with exposure. He’d come back, and he’d killed her.

  But then: Why not take the damned drugs? Was he scared off? Panic-driven enough to leave the drugs behind? Would he do that?

  Another scenario: Markos was running his drugs from Overton’s house, but she didn’t know. Maybe suspected, but didn’t know. She got whacked before Markos could retrieve the drugs. The cash deposits, they could still represent hush money from Matheson who had his own reasons to keep the medium quiet.

  A final scenario: Overton herself was running drugs, a little sideline to spiritual advising. For that matter, maybe her clients were after more than spirits.

  Nah. No way did that play.

  Claudia pulled her notebook from her pocket. She glanced out the narrow bathroom window. Clouds were starting to build again. The blustering clouds the day before hadn’t spilled a drop. Now, they were trying again. Claudia watched for a moment, then shook them off and prepared to inventory the cache.

  The house was silent as stone, so devoid of sound that when she clicked her pen open she heard the spring wheeze. And then she heard something else, a faint but distinct scrape immediately behind her.

  She whirled, just in time to see a shadow flash at the window. Dropping everything and cursing, Claudia ran. She bruised her elbow rounding the front door, then galloped like a mad woman around the side.

  Someone was vaulting the chain-link fence a hundred feet behind Overton’s house and Claudia rocketed after him. Her shoes thumped resolutely against the ground, calling cadence in time with her breath. She could do this; she could catch the son of a bitch. Pump the legs. Swing the arms. Pump the legs. Swing the arms. Time the breaths, and pump the legs, swing the arms.

  Boosted by adrenaline, she felt speed on her side up until the fence, a nasty thing five feet tall and laced with a thorny vine. Part of the vine was dying, and where it had browned the thorns rose like rusty nails. Claudia paused, losing precious seconds looking for a toehold. There was none. She fumbled at the greenest leaves, swore, and started to negotiate the barricade. The first leg over was easy. She almost lost her balance on the second. A jagged piece of metal on the fence snagged her jacket; she pulled furiously at it and heard it rip. A thorn tore at her skin; the cuts would pester like hives later. But then she was over, and as she dropped to the other side, Robin’s words came to mind: Mother Rambo. Claudia pinched out a hollow laugh and picked up the pursuit, trying to settle back into a rhythm.

  Pump the legs. Swing the arms. Pump the legs. Swing the arms.

  But breathing hurt suddenly and the son of a bitch was fast. He tore between two houses, leaped another fence, sprinted three blocks up the sidewalk, then stopped suddenly and turned to check the distance between them.

  Claudia’s lungs doled out breath in gasps. Goddamn! How long had they been running? Five minutes? Ten?

  While he paused, she bent forward unsteadily and braced her hands on her knees, sucking air, vowing to give up cigarettes, wondering how she still managed enough oxygen to play the oboe.

  The sprinter was young and lanky, dressed entirely in black. He stood similarly hunched, maybe just as winded, the fight sucked out of him. Across the distance they stared at each other like comic book gunslingers. Dogs began baying. A block over, a lawn mower started up.

  Grudgingly, Claudia straightened and rasped at him to stop—“police, freeze,” all those things—but the words were a spur. He bolted across the street and into a copse of trees.

  Where were the neighbors? Was anyone dialing 911?

  The stitch in Claudia’s side stabbed like a shard of glass. A blister rubbed mercilessly against her shoe, and her legs threatened to buckle. All the while she pushed herself back into an unsteady gait, she told herself no way, not now, oh no. Every breath had to be measured. Every pounding step sent a jolt clear to her jaw. They were both moving more slowly, true, but the gap was clearly widening.

  Claudia gave it another two hundred yards, then abruptly shifted to a walk. Screw it. Heaving and clutching her sides, she watched the man recede into shadow like some dream phantom. Let it go. She had the advantage of longer legs, but he had the advantage of youth. Time to give it up. And had the son of a bitch not tripped, he would’ve made it.

  He went down hard, skidding on damp leaves. The fall stunned him, and he lay frozen. Claudia watched disbelieving, then shrieked commands at her legs and accelerated one last time. Just as he began to find his feet, she pitched herself on top of him, knocking the wind out of both.

  Wheezing, Claudia straddled the punk and grabbed a fistful of hair. She yanked his head backward. Leaves stuck to his chin and mud smeared his cheeks.

  “Don’t even think about moving,” Claudia whispered hoarsely in his ear, the most she could manage.

  Without letting go of his hair, Claudia withdrew her revolver, then groped stiffly through her pocket for handcuffs. Aw, hell. Somewhere along the line they’d been jarred out of her pocket.

  Wobbling slightly, Claudia somehow got them both on their feet. She held her gun on the kid and demanded his belt. With some difficulty, she wound it around his wrists and secured his hands behind his back, then patted him down. Her efforts produced a pocket knife and a crumpled marijuana cigarette.

  The boy eyed her sourly.

  “Here’s the plan,” Claudia said. She grimaced, trying to work a charlie horse out of her left calf. “We’re going to walk very slowly back, but before we do I want to know who the hell you are.”

  The boy looked to be seventeen, maybe eighteen. His
hair was greasy, and as black as his clothes. A clot of dirt stuck to his right ear. He looked at Claudia from beneath hooded eyes, then shrugged.

  “Go play with your gun. I ain’t gotta tell you nuthin’,” he said. “I know my rights.”

  “Yeah?” Claudia pushed the youth against a tree. “You also know what carpenter ants are, kid?”

  He just looked at her.

  “I do because I had them in my kitchen once. They’re big buggers, the size of paper clips. And they’re called carpenter ants because they eat wood. Raw. The only thing they like better is flesh.” Claudia looked just above the kid’s head. “They can strip a rabbit in ten minutes. Don’t know how long it takes to peel skin off a body, but maybe we can find out.”

  Looking above him once more, Claudia said, “There’s a little trail of the big guys making their way down the tree to your face right now.”

  Squirming, the kid tried to crane his neck to see. Claudia wouldn’t let him. She showed him a thin smile.

  “Oh, just relax, for God’s sake. I’m a law officer, sworn to protect you. I wouldn’t let them get past your ears, not really.”

  It was one of Claudia’s more imaginative ruses. She knew zip about carpenter ants, but so what, the kid didn’t either. The ploy worked just swell.

  “Now come on,” Claudia said. “We’re both tired. The ants are hungry.” She raised her voice, gouged him with a look, and pressed him tighter against the tree. “What’s your damned name?”

  “Robert,” he said, all fight gone.

  “Robert who?”

  “Lindstrom.”

  Claudia grinned, gave him slack, and clamped a hand around his arm. She holstered the gun.

  Buddy. Buddy Lindstrom.

  “You’re under arrest, Buddy,” she said. “Maybe Shayla Kincaid will visit you in jail.”

  Her breath came almost naturally now, and she read him his rights. Then she lit a cigarette, offered one to Buddy, and walked him back toward Overton’s house, scanning the ground for her handcuffs on the way. They were hooked neatly on the fence with a long thread from her jacket.

  Plenty of charges to throw against this boy, yessir: resisting arrest, possession of drugs; attempted breaking and entering. Claudia pondered a list. When she was thinking clearly again, there might be more. Not all of them might stick, but that was okay. She’d learn what she needed before some public defender managed to get him sprung.

  “Having a good day, Buddy?” she asked Lindstrom once.

  He scowled and didn’t answer. Claudia didn’t mind. They made it back to Overton’s house just before it started to rain.

  Chapter 18

  The dog had actually taken three hits. The medical examiner’s report indicated one would’ve done it. But then, Claudia thought, the murderer obviously was not schooled in medical science. Everything about him was overkill.

  Irene Avery had been less fortunate than the dog. The baseball bat was much more precise than whatever weapon the killer had used on Donna Overton. The M.E. easily distinguished fourteen crushing blows, but there may have been more. The woman’s skull had caved in with two; three found her shoulders; nine met her face. A finger was broken. Her teeth had been jammed down her throat. And what could be determined by painstaking analysis was that she had died with her eyes open.

  Claudia sat at her desk, toying with an unlit cigarette. She’d read the report several times when it was issued, and three times now, just within the last hour. She quickly scanned to the bottom. As with Overton, there had been no sexual assault. No foreign blood or fiber under the nails. No bite marks. Estimated time of death: Saturday, somewhere between two and three in the morning.

  Presumption: Irene Avery had been nudged out of sleep—either by the killer or the dog—then efficiently executed.

  “Criminy, Hershey, you’d think you’d have that thing memorized by now.” Chief Suggs stood at Claudia’s desk, his thumbs hooked in his belt.

  “Not quite.”

  “Yeah, well you been starin’ at the thing for an hour,” Suggs growled. “For all the time you’re spendin’ on it you coulda made your way through the ‘begats’ in the Bible and learned just as much.”

  For a brief spell, Claudia had almost started to like the irascible chief of police. In her mind, he’d gone through a meltdown on her, too.

  But Suggs wanted Markos bad. He wanted the murders cleaned up fast, and—what was it Mary Curtell had said about police in general: Everything he needed was neatly laid out in black and white. Challenge from Claudia didn’t sit well with him, and he made little effort not to show it.

  Reaching for an ankle, Claudia scratched distractedly at one of the cuts left by a thorn. She ached all over.

  “The thing about the finger bothers me,” she said to Suggs at last. “It’s inconsistent with everything else in the report.”

  “Oh, horse shit,” said Suggs. “The poor woman got as far as openin’ her eyes and raisin’ her hand to defend herself, probably after the first swing of the bat. Her finger got busted.”

  “Then why isn’t the rest of her hand bruised, too?” Claudia asked.

  “Hershey, ain’t you ever banged your finger against a door or a wall? Or had a baseball movin’ at forty miles an hour tip your finger on a bad catch?” Suggs shook his head irritably. “Your finger breaks or fractures, but not your whole hand. In Avery’s case, the bat glanced off her finger. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Sure. And that’s just the way it happened with Donna Overton, too, right?” Claudia stood deliberately. “I don’t believe in coincidence. The X-rays show the right index finger on both the victims’ hands was broken almost identically.”

  Holding her hand out, Claudia pulled backward on her own index finger, demonstrating the manner in which the mediums’ fingers had been broken.

  “So what?” said Suggs. “Look, we’re talkin’ about some big guy, someone who towered over both those women. He swung a bat at Avery, something else at Overton. In both cases they held up a hand and the finger pressed backward. It ain’t coincidence at all, Hershey. It was instinct on their part.”

  Suggs impatiently took a turn demonstrating the movement he presumed both victims had used in defending themselves. “Coincidence woulda been if both those women survived the kind of bashing this lunatic gave ’em. And talkin’ about coincidence, there’s no coincidence in all that dope you found in Overton’s house and the fact that Markos is gone. The man—and we’re talkin’ about a man with a record of violence—the man had motive, and he had opportunity—”

  “Then why didn’t he take the drugs after he killed Overton?” Claudia demanded.

  “Somethin’ interfered, is all,” said Suggs. “When we pick him up—and we will—we’ll find out what that somethin’ was. Meanwhile, he whacked Avery because she knew somethin’ and then he sent that Buddy Lindstrom to pick up his stash when he figured we’d be busy chasin’ our tails on the Avery murder.”

  “It’s too neat.”

  “Look, Hershey. This ain’t some kind of Agatha Christie whodunit. You told me yourself Buddy confessed that the drugs belonged to Markos and he was just acting on Markos’ instructions by trying to get ’em back for him.”

  “He’s lying,” Claudia said swiftly. “He hasn’t got the first clue where Markos went. All he did know is where Markos was stashing the drugs. He went to the house to rip him off. Now he’s just trying to save himself, hoping we’ll cut him a deal by acting like he can hand Markos to us. And if we listen to him, that’s where we’ll wind up chasing our tails.”

  “Buddy’s not that smart.”

  “Neither is Markos.”

  The chief looked at Claudia for a long time. “You know, anyone else’d be happy as a pig in mud with the way this thing is turnin’ around for us, and thank the good Lord for it. Not only do we know who axed those women—”

  “We don’t know that for sure—”

  “—but we got a line into the drug activity here as straight as a s
tripe down the middle of a road.”

  “It’s two parts fairy tale and only one part the real world.”

  Suggs made a noise, threw up his hands and clomped off.

  * * *

  Claudia closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. This was the last place in the world she should be right now.

  Carella and Moody were stomping the psychic block all over again, hoping to find witnesses missed during the first neighborhood canvas. Suggs was fencing with the press over the phone—badly, judging by the bullish voice Claudia heard when she slipped out of the station at four o’clock. And someone, probably Peters, was hunting down the duty judge in Flagg, trying for a signature on a search warrant for Markos’ trailer.

  Everyone was working except the lead investigator.

  Unforgivable.

  “Your neck feels like someone drove a spike through it,” murmured Dennis. He stood behind Claudia, his hands deftly working the muscle, sorting out kinks. “Pile on any more tension and you’re going to need physical therapy.”

  “This is physical therapy,” said Claudia, reluctantly opening her eyes. She really ought to leave now.

  Across the room, a shaft of sunlight pierced a window and reflected off a metal tray holding art supplies. From there, it splintered into a thousand reckless points against the wall.

  But the dining room where Dennis seated her with an iced tea and a sympathetic smile was paneled in dark wood and decorated in muted tones. A perfect shield against the world. Claudia felt herself responding. She closed her eyes again and didn’t resist when Dennis’ hands shifted purposely to her shoulders.

  “You know, you ought to register those hands of yours, Mr. Heath,” Claudia said softly. “They’re practically lethal.”

  Dennis said nothing. His fingertips floated to her collar bone, tracing circles.

  Claudia sank further into the chair. She felt his breath on her and tried to think of something witty. Nothing came.

  “You just need to unwind a little,” said Dennis. His lips were at her ear; his fingers dipped lower, finding the soft spot at the bottom of her throat.