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

by Laura Belgrave

  “I know. She sort of told me while she was programming it. I wanted to warn you at the festival, but I guess we chose different paths there.”

  Claudia eased lower into the pillows. “Except for the portable toilets, I can’t think of a place I didn’t visit there. Hard to imagine I could’ve missed you.”

  “The pony rides. I was running the pony rides for kids.”

  “Ah. And all this time I thought you did cows.”

  “Horses, cows . . . I can see where you might get confused. But actually, if you’re going to get to know me—and I hope you are—then you should probably think of cows as cattle. Not to split hairs, but in the business we mostly call them cattle.”

  “That’s the lingo, huh?”

  “There you go.”

  “You’ve got a wonderful voice,” Claudia blurted. She clapped a hand over her mouth. “What I mean to say is you’ve got a wonderful way of explaining things.”

  Dixon laughed, the sound a low, melodic rumble that stopped her breath.

  “That being the case, maybe I should explain something else,” he said. “Like for instance I’m secretly glad I didn’t get a chance to warn you what old Mae was up to. No telling if you’d ever call me on your own. Mae thought not.”

  “She’s a frightening woman.”

  Dixon laughed again. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Maybe one day you’ll tell me.”

  “Sooner rather than later, I hope. Because I’d like to get to know you. Because I’d like to show you some . . . cows. Because, well, because you attract me in a pretty powerful way.”

  “I do?”

  “You do.”

  Claudia realized she was gripping the sheet so hard her knuckles had turned white. She relaxed them and watched the flesh tone flow back in.

  “You still there?” Dixon asked.

  “Mmm.”

  “Good. Because now would be an excellent time for you to flirt back with me. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

  “Is that what Mae Dunn told you?”

  “Nope. I thought of it all on my own.”

  “Okay, give me a minute. Let me think.” She did, too. “How’s this: I can no longer drive past big animals on four legs without thinking of you. It’s like some alien life force has taken over my mind.”

  “That’s not bad. You, uh . . . free to date?”

  “Yes, but I’m not very good at it.”

  “Neither am I, so we have that in common right off.”

  They stopped short of phone sex, which apparently Mae Dunn heartily endorsed as foreplay for busy people, but managed to work in plenty more flirtation in the next twenty minutes. After they hung up and Claudia had time to reflect on the call, she realized that ineptitude in dating wasn’t all they had in common. He was divorced. She was divorced. He had a boy. She had a girl. He had cows. She ate cows. It got a little dicey after that, but hey, you had to start somewhere.

  Chapter 32

  Sydney snored. Claudia almost woke her just to tell her that, to lord it over her a little, but then she worried that perhaps she snored, too. She’d fallen asleep before her sister; no telling what nocturnal horrors she’d unknowingly revealed. And anyway, Sydney’s snoring wasn’t seismic, nor was it responsible for stubbing out her sleep. The rain did that, and one thought: Hemmer’s house.

  The evidence in the investigation might be vague. Connections between suspects might be loose. But Hemmer’s house was an absolute. Everything started with the house—not with Hemmer the man, but with his house—and maybe it had more to yield yet.

  She needed to go back. In less than forty-eight hours Sandi’s grandparents would sign the house over to Manning. That quick, and he would own it. Hemmer was no longer a factor, but Manning wanted his house badly.

  The house, the house, the house. It was all about the house.

  Claudia showered and quickly threw on her clothes from the day before. She winced at every sound she made, but Sydney never budged. They’d shared wine late into the night, rolling out childhood stories, fast-forwarding through the last eight years, and giggling over banalities too stupid to recall now. One day, they’d get to the tough stuff. For now, it could wait.

  The rain sheeted against the hotel window, driven by a wind that would render umbrellas useless. Claudia scribbled a note. Then she grabbed her red-and-white bandanna from the dresser top. It would make a serviceable hand towel for the car. With one look back at Sydney, she eased out the door.

  * * *

  Moody caught her on the cell phone just after she parked the Imperial in Hemmer’s driveway. He was calling from a phone booth a few miles from Santiago’s former neighborhood. Rain hammered Claudia’s car with such ferocity they had to shout to hear each other, but he had news. He’d found and roused the friend of a friend who might know Santiago’s girlfriend. The friend didn’t know where she lived now, but he knew what church she attended. Moody was there now, and he’d approached her coming out of an early Mass.

  “You’ve done all this already?” Claudia shouted, checking her watch. She’d gone home only long enough to change and feed the cat. “It’s only nine-twenty, Mitch.”

  “You’re disappointed we finally caught a break?”

  “You’re sure we did?”

  “It’s him. It’s Santiago. The boots, the timing . . . everything fits. And his girl, Maria Gonzalez, I think she can help us with a positive ID. She’s got some of his personal items and . . . oh, Lieutenant, it’d break your heart to see her, to talk to her. She still lights candles for him at Mass. She still hoped he’d come back one day. She had to know he wouldn’t, said she figured something bad must’ve happened, had to have happened, but even so . . .”

  Thunder boomed over Moody’s next words and Claudia didn’t hear them. She caught an aggrieved waver in his voice, though, and through it could almost feel the anguish that gripped Maria Gonzalez. Life went on when someone disappeared, but against all odds, against all reason, hope waited.

  “. . . and then, because Santiago was here illegally, no one ever filed a missing persons report.”

  “They didn’t trust the police,” said Claudia. “Big surprise.”

  “What? I can barely hear you, Lieutenant.”

  “I said, they didn’t trust the police.”

  “Still can’t make you out.”

  “We’ll talk later, Mitch,” she yelled. “Good work.”

  “What book?”

  “No! Work! Good work! Never mind. We’ll talk later!”

  Claudia jammed the phone in her purse. The car windows were fogged over and the interior of the vehicle unbearably stifling. It would be muggy in Hemmer’s house, too, but maybe less claustrophobic. She braced herself and flung open the door to the pelting rain.

  * * *

  If there were such a thing as ghosts, Hemmer wasn’t one of them. His scent did not linger in the house. He cast no shadows on the wall. But Claudia felt his presence in the grim memories she’d stored from their encounter, and while rainwater puddled at her feet she wished for clairvoyance long enough to stir a detail that might hint at what he’d known and what she didn’t.

  For a minute she stood motionless in the foyer, where Hemmer had greeted her with the name “Charles Gottu.”

  Got you.

  She shook her head. Yeah. He’d got her, all right, and good, but for a man who talked about trust like he owned a patent on it his stunt was more shameful than any of the carnival hustles she had seen yesterday. Of course, he’d insisted on calling it a “ruse,” as if the distinction would elevate his trick into something admirable. And maybe for him it did. For all his erratic ramblings, Claudia remembered being struck by how carefully he seemed to choose his words. She moved into Hemmer’s family room, reminding herself to go slow and resist substituting her own words for his.

  The crime scene clean-up crew had done a masterful job removing all signs of violence. A prospective buyer would see nothing but gleaming tiles and unmar
red walls, all of it so white the room looked new. It hardly mattered; Manning had made sure realtors wouldn’t be showing the house.

  Claudia retreated from the family room just long enough to find the thermostat for the air conditioning. Policy be damned, she needed the house cool to think. When she returned, she sat on the floor where Hemmer had instructed her to sit. She gazed around, struggling to reproduce in her mind’s eye what now seemed more the stuff of a bad dream than a real event. But it had been real; the lump on her head from Hemmer’s gun, though no longer painful, was reminder enough.

  She gazed at the wall where Hemmer’s aquarium had been. What did he call the fish? Platys? Tetras? The names didn’t matter, but Claudia seized on them, anyway, in a mental exercise that might open her mind to details that did matter. The others came to her after a moment. Swordtails. Guppies. And she remembered that the water was cloudy.

  Incredibly, it had only been nine days ago. Hemmer was dead. A migrant named Juan-Carlos Santiago was dead. Bonolo wasn’t Bonolo, but Farina, and he was on the run. It all tied to Willow Whisper and desperation marked every turn, but for all of that what did Indian Run’s finest have to show for it? A grizzled old guy in jail, and even he wouldn’t stay there long.

  Claudia shook off the failures and concentrated. Hemmer had talked about movies and he’d talked about games. He liked Twister, she remembered that. They’d discussed her problem with an air conditioning company, but no . . . that was nothing; she’d brought it up herself. He’d been all over the board—paint, bats and radar, drug abuse, trust. Intermittently, he’d ranted about security and community, the point of it all, the lack of a point.

  Links? Any links at all? She gave it a few more minutes, then shook her head, frustrated, and moved upstairs to Hemmer’s office.

  Without the computers on his desk the room looked twice as big as she remembered it. She flipped on a desk lamp and walked the room as she’d done before, her certainty that the house had more to yield diminishing with every drawer she opened and every file folder she turned. But the house gushed cool air, and she took her time, trying to imagine Hemmer bent over his desk, tapping on a computer, carefully filing papers away.

  By nature he had been a cautious man. In the last few weeks he’d grown paranoid as well. But if anything paranoia would’ve made him more careful, not less. It simply didn’t follow that a man so driven would allow whatever damning papers he’d compiled to be casually available. He might have come close once. Claudia recalled the “crinkum-crankum” computer document with nothing on it. Booey had suggested Hemmer probably started the document, then erased the text before he ever stored it.

  That damned word.

  It lived on his computer. It lived on his blotter pad. What was that about? Claudia glared at the red dictionary on top of Hemmer’s bookcase. The damned word didn’t even appear in a damned dictionary, not in her damned dictionary and not in any damned dictionary. She grabbed Hemmer’s dictionary and shook it, as if the stupid word would flutter to the floor. Nothing did, of course, and she set it back down, struck again by the irony that she and the man who took her hostage used the same dictionary. His showed more wear, but otherwise looked practically identical to her own. But so what? They both had daughters, too. It didn’t make them kin.

  Irritated, she started to cross the room to the closet, then paused midway when her own word caught up to her. Practically. She murmured it aloud. Her dictionary and Hemmer’s dictionary were not identical. They were only practically identical. His was more worn because it was older. She grabbed the book again and checked the copyright date. Look at that, 1980. Old, old, old. She thumbed to the “C” listing and flipped some pages, tracing the columns of words with her finger.

  “Well, how about that,” she whispered.

  There it was. Crinkum-crankum. And check it out, the dictionary called it “archaic.” The editors apparently struggled whether to include the word at all, because they’d given it a miserly one-sentence definition: “anything full of twists and turns.” That much Claudia already knew (thank you, Booey.) But what made the entry interesting was the word “twists.” It was faintly underlined in pencil.

  A paranoid man would do that, and Hemmer was paranoid. A paranoid man would ascribe meaning to it, and Hemmer ascribed meaning to virtually everything. Claudia looked at the underlined word. Six little letters. On their own, so what? But she knew where Hemmer was taking her now, had decoded enough of his thought process to see the only place he could be taking her. Sure. Drop the last “s” from “twists” and add “er.” It gave you “twister.”

  Twister. The game of Twister. A crinkum-crankum kind of game if ever there was one, and he’d given it to her outright, just like he’d given her the names of the fish, all of it sounding like just so much drivel. But “Twister” wasn’t drivel. He’d asked if she knew it. She did. He’d said “good,” then scoffed at the hostages and told her they probably wouldn’t; they would probably never get the significance. He’d handed her a clue and with what small measure of faith he still retained trusted her to figure it out if need be.

  Or maybe he was showing off, just a little.

  Claudia rubbed her eyes. It didn’t matter now. He died before he could explain his motives and as she thought of him gasping in her clutch she thought she understood the last word he’d breathed into her ear, the garbled word that sounded like dishree.

  Dictionary.

  No wordplay that time, just the last utterance he could manage.

  She set the dictionary aside and went in search of Twister. Thirty minutes later she found it in the garage in a box marked “clothes for donation.” It wasn’t the first place she would’ve thought to check for files, and wondered why Hemmer hadn’t thrown out a hint to bring her there earlier. But maybe he had and she’d dismissed it with most of his other ramblings.

  Claudia quickly flipped through the contents of the Twister box, then brought it inside and set it on Hemmer’s dining room table. The rain had taken a timeout, so she headed for the patio to smoke a cigarette and call Suggs. He’d want to know she’d found what the intruder had missed. When she was done with both she turned off Hemmer’s air conditioning, locked up, and hurried to the Imperial before the heavens burst again. With luck, the bookseller would have company in jail by day’s end.

  Chapter 33

  From somewhere in her memory bank, Claudia recalled the seven deadly sins as pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth. In context of the Hemmer case, she wasn’t sure about gluttony and discounted sloth altogether, but understood that one way or another the remaining five sins drove the desperate acts that left at least two people dead—and maybe three. Condense the sins to their basic components and you were left with money and sex, the quinella in most murders.

  It wasn’t a revelation. Even a rookie knew that money or sex or both trumped all other motives in crime, and the Hemmer case, stripped of its bizarre crinkum-crankum, revealed itself no differently. But money and sex had only been the genesis. Fear, thought Claudia, propelled them along.

  For three tedious hours she’d been at her desk, eating junk food and squinting between files and her computer screen. The ants were gone, maybe discouraged by the rain that once again fell steadily. Claudia suspected they’d return with the sun—if it ever surfaced, which looked less likely as the day wore on. Already, flash flood warnings had been issued, and officers were working double shifts to cope with abandoned vehicles and motorists who mistook canals for roadway.

  She frowned at her computer screen and queued a document to her printer from the Division of Corporations at Florida’s Department of State. She would never gush over computers like Booey did, but on a Sunday when most government offices were closed an Internet connection could still extract at least some information from them. She waited impatiently while her printer toiled over the document, the last she needed for now. When it finished, she correlated the details on it with her notes, grabbed her office camera, and brought he
r files into Suggs’ office.

  The chief had been working the roads along with his officers, and his hair lay patchy against his scalp from rain. She showed him what she had and told him where she was going. He didn’t like it, and argued against it until she vowed to make her visit nothing more than a visual check.

  “You’ve poked a nest of hornets, Hershey, and pretty soon one of them is gonna sting you,” he said, his eyes boring into hers. “That’s one thing, and I tell you so you get it into your head that I can’t get backup out if you do something stupid enough to need it. The other thing is the rain. I got Carella on the road now and if Moody ever makes it back from that neighborhood where you sent him I’m gonna put his ass out there, too. So go make your check, and just a check, and make it fast. One more inch of this stuff comin’ down and I’ll need you wading through water with the rest of us.”

  Claudia nodded and turned to leave before he could change his mind.

  “Hey, Hershey!”

  She hung back.

  “Don’t forget your damned radio.”

  * * *

  The rain showed its muscle everywhere, pushed by gusty winds that howled and bent palm trees nearly double. Debris clotted the roads. Traffic lights swayed at dangerous angles. Once, Claudia nearly swerved off the road to avoid a plastic patio chair that pitched across her lane like tumbleweed. She didn’t have time to ponder where it came from; the storm consumed all her attention.

  Above the roar of the wind and rain and thunder, her portable squawked incessantly with officers conveying information on malfunctioning traffic signals, washed-out intersections, and downed power lines. Paramedics fought for the airwaves with their own troubled reports—heart attack victims they couldn’t get to, fire-rescue trucks breaking down, a broken communications link to the hospital. No one with a scintilla of sense would be outside now, but by the time Claudia considered a retreat she was more than halfway to her destination, her progress measured by street signs she could barely see.