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

by Laura Belgrave

  “Well, who would come in an . . .” Sandi’s eyes widened. “Wait. You mean someone like maybe a burglar?”

  Claudia offered a vague nod.

  “Dad’s dead,” she said, her voice wobbling. “Why can’t everyone just leave him alone?”

  Claudia had no answer to that, but when Sandi turned away to hide her tears, she pulled the girl into an embrace. Sandi didn’t resist and for a moment they stood like that, not moving, the girl weeping silently. Claudia felt her shudder a few times, but then Sandi moved away, her eyes as remote as the day before.

  Once, not all that long ago, Claudia had seen the flame dim in her own daughter’s eyes. The reasons were different, yet powerful enough to plague Robin with nightmares for months afterward. The flame hadn’t died, though—not quite—and eventually it flared as brightly as before. Claudia looked at Sandi. Robin’s triumph was something to hold onto for the damaged girl who followed her wordlessly back outside.

  * * *

  In exchange for the scorn Chief Mac Suggs typically displayed for the Flagg County Sheriff’s Office, he received barely concealed contempt in return. That was a problem because he had no fishing buddies in the sheriff’s office, no secret alliances, not even a pimply faced nephew in the mail room or records department he could leverage for favors. When the chief needed something he couldn’t provide through his own department—special patrols, crime scene technicians, lab work, a canine unit—he had to call the sheriff’s office for it and the town had to pay up. The arrangement wasn’t unusual. Police chiefs in small police departments across the country relied on bigger brethren to get the job done. Plenty of them resented it, but few carried the hostility quite like Suggs.

  Claudia didn’t dwell on it, but when she saw the sheriff’s crime scene technicians pulling up to Hemmer’s house a full forty minutes late she had to rearrange her face to keep her own resentment from showing. Normally, she wouldn’t bother. But she needed them and before they’d even braked to a stop she presented an amicable smile, as if she’d enjoyed roasting in the sun while awaiting their arrival. Of course, it hadn’t all been wasted time. She’d called Suggs, talked to Sandi’s grandmother, and arranged for a patrol officer to take the girl back to the motel. Even so, her patience was taxed and her mood didn’t improve when she saw the team the sheriff’s office had dispatched.

  There were two technicians, one male and one female. They strode from their vehicle with disingenuous apologies for the delay, blaming it on a high priority case they implied could not be solved without them. Claudia let it pass. They were young and they were civilians. They probably believed their own bullshit. She led them into the house, exchanging names along the way but refusing to give them the satisfaction of a reaction when they introduced themselves as Jack and Jill—no last names, of course, because who bothered with that anymore?

  “So what’ve we got?” Jack said self-importantly once inside Hemmer’s office. He already knew there was no body, but peered beneath the desk as if he might find one anyway, or at least an intriguing sign of blood. “A burglary?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” said Claudia. “Right now I’ve only got a possible illegal entry.”

  She ignored Jack’s expression and laid out what she needed. Jill fired up a camera, metered for light, and took pictures. Jack started working surfaces for prints. Claudia watched for a few minutes. They weren’t on anybody’s “A” List, but they’d do. She wrestled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully circumnavigated the small room, looking, probing, peeking, examining. Now and then she gave Jack or Jill something to bag, her mind leaping ahead to possibilities she didn’t like.

  Jack and Jill filtered her out and talked shop while they worked. Claudia wondered what they did in their spare time, but didn’t dwell on it for long because within fifteen minutes of her own exploration she found something behind Hemmer’s books that didn’t belong. She pondered its significance, then moved on, not looking up until Jill pointedly cleared her throat forty minutes later.

  “Claudia,” she said, “we’re—”

  “Lieutenant is fine.” The kids really needed a few lessons in protocol. “What’s up?”

  Jill shrugged. “What’s up is we’re done.”

  “Yup. Good to go,” said Jack. He made a show of checking his watch, a digital too big for his wrist. “Nice meeting you and all.”

  “Hang on. Bag this.” She handed Jack what she’d found. “Take the desk pad, too.” She gestured at what looked like an artist’s oversized sketch pad, its pages glued at the top and tucked into corners at the bottom. Not even a stray pencil mark showed on the first page. Claudia had already thumbed through the rest. Nothing on any of them.

  “The guy wasn’t much of a doodler,” said Jack.

  “Except that—”

  “I know.” He rolled his eyes. “A documents examiner might pull up some impressions. That it?”

  “That’s it. Except for the computers, of course. I need those brought in, too.”

  Jack and Jill exchanged disbelieving looks. No body, no blood, and they could kiss another half hour goodbye. Claudia turned away so they wouldn’t see her smiling.

  Chapter 9

  Claudia knew a thing or two about cows. They made milk. They made hamburgers. She suspected a few other things, chiefly that cows were probably every bit as stupid as they looked. But there had to be more to cows than that, because if not, she had no idea how she would hold an intelligent conversation with Tom Dixon if she ever ran into him again. The very idea that Dixon had breached her mind alarmed her. Even more alarming was that her attention had inexplicably flickered to him in the middle of the chief’s cramped office, where theoretically she was explaining why the Hemmer case wasn’t closed after all.

  She felt the chief scowling at her and looked up from her notes, where she had jotted “cow” in a margin. She glanced at Moody and Carella, patrol officers who occasionally shed their uniforms for street clothes when an investigation threatened to loom out of control. Their faces were expectant.

  “You gonna answer my question today, Hershey, or is today altogether too damned inconvenient for you?” Suggs cracked his knuckles and waited. “Well?”

  It was early on in their meeting, but not early on in the day. Claudia had forfeited lunch to baby-sit Jack and Jill at Hemmer’s house. She’d lost another hour making nice with lab techs at the sheriff’s office, hoping to get the Hemmer case bumped up in their priorities—or even to get it on their priority list. Another hour and a half went to phone calls and playing catch-up at her desk. Calamity was descending. She didn’t need Suggs to remind her of that.

  “You’re talking about the video I found,” she said.

  Suggs looked at her, exasperated. “Hell, yeah, I’m talkin’ about the video! Right now it looks like it’s the only thing worth talkin’ about and from what I can see it doesn’t exactly support the high voltage direction you’re tryin’ to take us in. Fact is, all it does show is that Sandi Hemmer clearly did not know her daddy as well as she thought she did.”

  “It’s . . . a problem,” Claudia conceded.

  The chief made a rude noise and glared at the video, which now sat on his desk as innocently as a police training film, but depicted the kind of pornographic production not available on even the most liberal pay-per-view stations. They’d all watched it in uncomfortable silence, fast-forwarding past a grainy segment involving Shetland ponies. No question that it was a black market film. You wanted something like this and you had to actively seek it out, which didn’t jibe with the man Hemmer had presented himself to be, but most assuredly came from his bookcase. Claudia wished she hadn’t found it. No question; it was a complication. Carella caught her eye and nodded toward Moody. His ears still bore traces of red from their private screening.

  Suggs abruptly stood. He turned toward the wall, where a thirteen-pound bass mounted for eternity hung slightly askew. He nudged it straight, then looked at Claudia.

  “It’s not ju
st the video that’s a problem, Hershey. The mayor doesn’t even know about that yet. But he knows you been back to Hemmer’s house with the girl and that’s enough for him to conclude he needs to take a ‘personal interest’ in our investigation.”

  “He’s already been in touch?” asked Moody. “Unbelievable.”

  “You just get off the boat? Come on! Lane’s got spies everywhere, and hell yeah, he called the second they checked in with him. He told me he’s very ‘troubled.’ He’s troubled that Indian Run’s ace detective was out and about with the Hemmer girl instead of being on what he called a ‘much-needed’ vacation. He’s troubled that Indian Run’s ace detective is tryin’ to turn an open-and-shut case into a ‘dubious situation.’ And he’s troubled that Indian Run’s ace police chief is ‘rudderless’ when it comes to running a department.”

  Suggs sat back down. He unfolded a sheet of paper on his desk. “I even took notes. The mayor—.”

  “I think—” Claudia began.

  “Don’t think yet, because I haven’t even got to the best part, which I didn’t need to write down at all. What the good mayor said next was, ‘Settle this down fast or I’ll see to it that someone else does.’”

  Ribald laughter floated into the office from the multipurpose room. A phone rang. Then another. Beneath it all was the ever-present sound of the dispatch console. Officers checking in, asking for case numbers, going 10-40 for burgers and fries. It had been the backdrop to Claudia’s police career for more than twelve years.

  “Hershey? You listenin’ to me?”

  She came back. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Okay, then.” Suggs straightened. “Want to know what I said to the mayor? I said ‘yes, sir.’ I said ‘I understand, sir.’ That’s what I said.”

  Claudia nodded. She didn’t look at Moody or Carella. She was pretty sure they weren’t looking at her, either.

  “But it’s what I didn’t say that matters, and what I didn’t say is what I’m gonna tell you now, and it better not leave this room.” Suggs leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I don’t like Mayor Arthur Lane. Bigger, though, I don’t respect him and I don’t trust him, not one little bit. I wouldn’t let him walk my dog if I was laid up to the point where I couldn’t move and the dog’d crapped all over every room of my house. Now you, Hershey, I don’t always like you, either. Truth is, it kinda comes and goes. But I do respect you and I do trust you. Carella? Moody? Both of you, too. Any of you, I’d hand you the leash, take a nap, and know the dog would get walked and the stink in the house would be gone when I woke up.”

  Most of the time Claudia could anticipate what the chief would say. This wasn’t one of them. Carella found his voice first. “Guess we can’t ask for a better vote of confidence because the way I remember it is you have a big dog. A really big dog.”

  Suggs snorted. “A rottweiler. He gets in your face and his breath alone could knock you out. Forget the dog, though. Point I’m tryin’ to make is that whether Hershey here is draggin’ us into quicksand or not, Lane’s not gonna call the shots. If he thinks he can close us down without us takin’ a proper look at the Hemmer mess, then he’s gonna find that his ‘dubious situation’ is gonna get even dubiouser. I’ve played his way too long and on too much.” He cleared his throat. “Hershey, your coffee’s gettin’ cold. Take a sip and then run this by us one more time. Persuade me that I’m not about to trash my career for nothin’.”

  Claudia picked up her cup. “Rottweiler, huh?”

  * * *

  She laid it out seamlessly, bringing them back to the hostage crisis at Hemmer’s house. A man with no history of violence had taken five people hostage. Her take? No doubt about it; he’d gone over the edge. But he’d taken the leap with an unloaded gun, which suggested that he had no intention of killing anyone.

  “The guy whacked you on the head, Hershey,” said Suggs. “The blow could’ve killed you.”

  “And if it had, no one would’ve been more surprised than he. I think Hemmer measured that risk and took it to prove he was serious. And to seize the advantage from the beginning.”

  “It worked,” said Carella.

  No argument there. Claudia still had a lump on the back of her head. “We could let everything be if not for the fact that someone broke into his house after he was dead, after everyone bought into him being a whacko, after Bonolo was made into a hero, and after the press already had a terrific story that would’ve died down in another day or two. Why would—”

  “You don’t know for a fact yet that anyone really broke in,” Suggs said swiftly. “You got the girl sayin’ her daddy’s stuff was messed up and you got your own speculation. Worse, you turned up that video, which don’t exactly support the notion that Hemmer was a choir boy. So once again, Hershey, here’s where I need to be persuaded.”

  “Two things,” said Claudia. “First, Hemmer had some neatly organized folders in the family room where he held us hostage. He told me he’d only brought downstairs what I needed to see, implying that he had other files with additional information related to his dispute with the homeowners association. He was a meticulous man, so I tend to believe him. But crime scene didn’t turn up anything and neither did I—not a single document or even a scribbled note. My thinking is that however it was done, someone got into the house to take those files before Sandi’s grandparents unearthed them, which would’ve happened when they boxed up Hemmer’s possessions and closed up the house for sale.”

  She took a breath. “And the video? I think whoever took those files might have planted the video to reinforce Hemmer’s ‘bad guy’ image, to make sure no one ever had reason to even begin to think differently about him. The porn doesn’t sound like Hemmer, but even if it did, hiding it practically in the open doesn’t. Do the arithmetic. Take the video and add it to some missing files. Now add things being out of place. And finally, add his daughter’s observations. We have more than coincidence.”

  “Uh-huh. So where’s the hard evidence?”

  “We’ll get to it.”

  The chief sighed. “Look, I’m not hedging, Hershey. We’re goin’ forward with this thing. I’m runnin’ full-tilt on blind faith and your history of ferreting out crookedy little details that make the case in the end. But it’d be of considerable help if you’d give me one of those crookedy little details sooner rather than later. Please—tell me your sandbaggin’ on somethin’.”

  Now Claudia sighed. “I wish.”

  Carella hummed the opening to “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Nobody smiled. “From Disney’s Pinocchio movie,” he said. The silence lengthened and his voice trailed off with, “A 1940 release . . .”

  “Maybe the lab’ll give us something to go on,” said Moody. He pulled at his mustache. “Prints? Clothing fibers? A lead on the source of that video?”

  “I should get a report on prints before the day is out,” said Claudia. “Some of the other stuff we gathered, it’ll probably come in piecemeal.”

  “We can’t wait on piecemeal,” said Suggs, “so what do you propose we do in the meanwhile? I know you got a meanwhile, Hershey.”

  Claudia rolled her pen between her fingers. “Meanwhile, we revisit the people who pissed Hemmer off enough to make him step off a cliff. We begin there and see where it takes us, because there was nothing random about Hemmer’s files going missing.”

  “The people who irritated him . . .” Moody ticked them off on his fingers. “Bill Bonolo. Kurt Kitner. Jennifer Parrish. Gloria Addison.”

  “Pipelines to the town hall,” said the chief. He stood and looked at Moody and Carella, then settled his gaze on Claudia. “You all had best work fast. I won’t cave on this, but I can’t guarantee I’ll keep my job long enough to see it through.”

  Chapter 10

  Sydney Stihl’s remarkable career as a photographer was launched the day she immortalized on black and white film the horrifying crash of a twin-engine plane, which inexplicably spiraled out of control and plunged nose first into the ground betw
een two houses in a quiet residential neighborhood. Sydney Stihl was sixteen years old. The plane carried her parents, and one of those houses was theirs—and, of course, Sydney’s.

  The crash occurred on a brilliant morning, not long after the sun burned the dew off the grass. Sydney knew the plane would be flying over. Her father had told her to watch for it, that he would tip a wing in greeting and then continue on his way. Sydney was new to photography and excited about shooting from a challenging angle. She planned carefully, choosing a vantage point from a modest distance that would allow her to frame both the plane and the house in one shot. From the moment the plane came into view she was ready. Her first shot showed the plane against a sky empty of clouds, the sun glinting off the fuselage like a starburst. Even for a professional photographer it would have been an impressive shot, but what people would whisper about later were the other shots, for even though Sydney had to see through her lens what was coming she continued to shoot. In twenty seconds, maybe thirty, she managed twelve pictures. When neighbors ran to her after the plane thundered into the ground, they had to pry the camera from her hands.

  One way or another, the local newspaper managed to acquire three of the photos, including one that showed the wreckage between both houses. The pictures ran in a sequence, along with a riveting story about the ironic tragedy that produced such captivating images. Weeks later the paper ran another story, this one with investigators’ conclusions that pilot error was to blame.

  Stihl was thirty-seven now. She owned dozens of cameras and went nowhere without at least two. Hers was not a household name, but within photography circles it carried star status and she received critical acclaim for much of her work, which embraced everything from photojournalism to fashion photography to coffee table books. Even now, when most photographers were turning to digital photography, Stihl’s preference remained black and white 35mm film, which she’d used for some of her most compelling and occasionally haunting images.