Raspberry Ripple Murder

by Abby Byne

  “Generally obscene threats and insults, I gather,” said Stan. “That part of her story is the only part which rings remotely true.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Bitsie. “I suspect that Monty was there, but Marco never even knew that he was in the building.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Bitsie declined to answer. She had her suspicions, but she couldn’t back them up, so she wasn’t ready to voice them aloud.

  “I think,” said Bitsie, “that Jennifer had better be sleeping with her eyes open.”

  “You think Jennifer is in danger?” Stan asked. “I thought she was your prime suspect?”

  “Can’t she be both things at once?” Bitsie retorted, and Stan didn’t press her for any further explanation.

  As of the present, the police were narrowing in on Monty as a prime suspect, but having a suspect didn’t help much since he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Bitsie decided she could no longer put off talking to Marco’s sister, Daisy. It had been nine days since Marco’s death, and, although there was a general consensus that Marco’s death was suspicious, there were too many pieces missing from the puzzle for Bitsie to be able to rest easy and wait for the police to come up with answers on their own.

  Bitsie called the number Raina had given her but got no answer. She left a message explaining who she was, but not what she wanted.

  An hour later, Daisy called Bitsie back.

  “Raina said you’d probably be calling,” said Daisy.

  “I’m really sorry for your loss,” said Bitsie.

  “Me too,” said Daisy flatly. There was a long pause before she spoke again. “Look, I’ve been trying to decide if I should go to the police or not. There was some weird stuff going on with my brother’s fiancée right before he died.”

  “What kind of weird stuff?”

  “I’d rather not have this conversation over the phone,” said Daisy.

  Bitsie was afraid Daisy was going to hang up on her, but she didn’t. Instead, Daisy proposed that they meet at the pocket park near Raina’s daycare, and, twenty minutes later, Bitsie was sitting on a bench beside Daisy, who appeared remarkably composed, under the circumstances.

  “It’s about the life insurance policy my brother got,” Daisy said. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

  “You mean the one Marco had taken out for his kids?”

  “No, he still had that one when he died. There was another one that he took out when he and Jennifer got engaged.”

  “Marco took out an insurance policy for Jennifer.”

  “Yeah. I guess it was a really big one, too.” Daisy looked around uncomfortably and lowered her voice. “You know I’d be suspicious that she had something to do with his death, except for one thing.”

  “What is that one thing?”

  “By the time Marco died, he’d already canceled the policy.”

  “Do you know exactly when Jennifer and Marco broke up.”

  “Not exactly. He told me they’d broken up a little less than a week before he died. He works a lot, though, so sometimes I can go a whole week without talking to him. Still, it couldn’t have been more than two weeks that they’d been broken up when he told me about it.”

  “Do you know why they broke up?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I know what he said, although it’s hard to believe that what he was accusing her of is true.”

  “What was he accusing her of?”

  “He said that she’d tricked him into believing that he had a brain tumor.”

  “It may be hard to believe,” said Bitsie, “but I’m pretty sure that it is true. A couple of days ago, Jennifer’s brother admitted to posing a doctor and giving Marco a false diagnosis.”

  “That’s what Raina already told me, but—I still can’t quite believe it. What kind of person would do something so cruel?”

  “It appears to be what Jennifer did.”

  “Right before they broke up, I guess Marco got suspicious and went to another doctor and found out he didn’t even have a tumor. That made him really mad, and he doesn’t get mad easily. Jennifer claimed not to know anything about any of it, but Marco didn’t believe her. I wondered, at the time, if he might not have gone a little crazy and imagined the whole thing, but he’s never been the paranoid type. If anything, he’s too trusting. But after he died like that, I started to wonder if Jennifer hadn’t had something to do with the accident.”

  “What do you know about the life insurance policy?”

  “The same day he and Jennifer broke up, Marco went straight down to see his insurance agent and canceled the policy. At least that’s what he told me.”

  “Do you know if Jennifer knew Marco planned to cancel the policy?”

  “I don’t think they talked about it, but you’d think she’d assume that’s what he’d do, sooner or later, seeing as they had broken up.”

  “But how did he get the policy issued in the first place? Insurance agents aren’t terribly keen on issuing life insurance policies for clients diagnosed with a terminal illness,” Bitsie said.

  “I don’t know, but probably Jennifer put him up to not disclosing his tumor.”

  “True. Since it wasn’t a real doctor who diagnosed the tumor in the first place, there wouldn’t have been any record of it. Jennifer’s brother Pete was using the office of a doctor who’d hired his company to clean for them,” Bitsie explained. “He’d go in on Sunday when nobody else was around. I’m guessing that he could have stolen images of scans of someone with a real tumor to show Marco. Raina said she was shown scans when she went with him, but I wonder how he tricked Marco into believing he’d actually had an MRI.”

  “Maybe Pete’s company also cleaned a facility with an MRI machine?”

  “Maybe,” said Bitsie, “but don’t you think that would be hard to pull off?”

  “My brother was a very trusting guy,” said Daisy. “I think Jennifer could be a professional scam artist. I think she might have married her first two husbands because she knew they were about to die.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, think about it. When she and Marco first got together, she told me all about how sad it was to be a widow. Both her first two marriages ended in less than a year, she said. At the time, I felt really sorry for her, but now I wonder if it wasn’t all just crocodile tears.”

  “It does seem suspicious,” Bitsie agreed. “But if it’s true that Jennifer had been targeting men who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, then why did she hone in on Marco, who was perfectly healthy?”

  “That I don’t understand,” said Daisy.

  And they might never know, thought Bitsie. Still, she had garnered some useful information. Marco had evidentially had a life insurance policy taken out for Jennifer, but the million-dollar question was whether or not Jennifer had known that Marco had already canceled it before the night he died.

  The mystery of Monty’s disappearance resolved itself three days later when he arrested while attempting to hold up a convenience store three towns away. The charges against him were sufficient to hold him. Little Creek police department sent an officer over to question him.

  According to Stan, it was the investigating officer’s belief that Monty was lying through his teeth about his activities the night that Marco died.

  “Monty claims that he did go to the bakery to confront Marco,” Stan told Bitsie. “He says that he went there because Marco owed him unpaid wages.”

  “What did Monty have to say about Jennifer’s whereabouts?” asked Bitsie.

  “Monty agrees with Jennifer on the time frame of her coming and going—“

  “Which matches up with what was caught on the ATM surveillance camera?”

  “Yes, more or less. So, there’s nothing new there, but the main bit of information—if you can call it that—is that Monty is claiming that Marco was already dead when he arrived at the bakery.”

  “So, he’s claimi
ng to have nothing to do with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how is he accounting for his absence these two weeks?”

  “He isn’t. He’s refusing to say where he was, or what he was doing, or who he was with. My gut says he’s spent the last thirteen days holed up somewhere in a cheap hotel waiting to see how the chips would fall.”

  “So basically, questioning Monty yielded nothing.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say it yielded nothing,” said Stan. “Monty is claiming that Jennifer confessed to killing Marco.”

  “Just like that? She confessed?”

  “That’s more or less what Monty is claiming to have happened. He says he came in and found Jennifer standing over Marco’s body, and she just looked at him and said something like, ‘I killed him.’”

  “I’m not inclined to believe a word Monty says,” Bitsie muttered, then she said much more loudly, “Has anyone seen Jennifer since they brought her in for questioning? That was three days ago.”

  “Not that I know of,“ said Stan. “They tried to get her back down to the station to answer some more questions, but she’s not answering her phone, and the officer who went to her house got no response at the front door.”

  “I have a very bad feeling about this,” said Bitsie.

  “About what? About Monty? I think it’s a very positive development that they’ve got him locked up,” said Stan.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  Bitsie ignored her brother’s question.

  “We close early tomorrow,” said Bitsie, “since it’s Saturday. How would you feel about doing a little fishing?”

  “Fishing? Since when did you take up fishing?”

  “Since about three minutes ago.”

  “You know something I don’t?”

  “I don’t know anything,” said Bitsie, “but let’s just say I have very strong suspicions.”

  “We don’t have any bait,” Liz pointed out, as they loaded a couple of old rods of Stan’s into the back of his pickup.

  “You don’t need bait,” Bitsie retorted, “if you don’t really care to catch anything.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Liz.

  “That’s OK,” said Bitsie. “We’re not looking for fish.”

  “What are you looking for?” Liz asked.

  “Something I really hope we don’t find,” said Bitsie.

  Liz looked over at Stan. Stan just shrugged.

  “Sometimes,” said Liz, looking back at Stan, “I wonder about the sanity of your sister.”

  “I’ve always wondered that,” Stan retorted. “But this time, I think she may be onto something.”

  They arrived at Brink’s Lake to find that they were not the only ones who’d had the idea of spending their Saturday afternoon fishing.

  Bitsie jumped out and started hauling the poles and a couple of folding stools from the back.

  “Everybody carry something,” she said in a low voice. “The plan is that we walk all the way around the lake without making it obvious that we are searching for a body.”

  “I didn’t know we were searching for a body,” said Liz.

  “I think you’d better explain whose body we’re looking for,” said Stan.

  “Why do you need to know that?” Bitsie demanded. She immediately regretted it. What was it about being a little sister that made a person defensive long after an age-difference of a couple of years should mean nothing.

  “What I mean is,” Bitsie continued, moderating her tone, “that a dead body is a dead body, and no matter whose dead body it is, I expect we’d still be interested in it.”

  “Might you have any idea what this hypothetical dead body might be wearing?”

  “Something bright,” said Bitsie. She thought for a moment and added, “and possibly hoop earrings.”

  They made it all the way to the opposite side of the lake before they found anything. It was far from where the rest of the fishermen were, and the well-beaten path had dwindled to a hard-to-distinguish track through waist-high weeds and the occasional bramble. It was hot and muggy, and by the time they’d gone twenty yards, they were covered with mosquito bites.

  Stan was the one who found Jennifer.

  She was lying in a stand of cattails. She’d definitely been dead for a while. When Stan called them over, Liz turned away before she got within ten feet of the body. Bitsie stopped short beside Liz. It was obvious, even at that distance, that Jennifer's death had not been a peaceful one.

  “How did you know we’d find her here?” Stan asked. “How did you even know she was dead?”

  “I didn’t know,” Bitsie insisted. “It was just a suspicion.”

  “Care to share the basis of that suspicion?” Stan said. “I expect my buddies down at the police station are going to have lots of questions for you. Telling a police detective you dragged us out here to not go fishing and just happened to stumble on a dead body isn’t going to cut it with them.”

  “You know who likes to go fishing here?” said Bitsie.

  “How would I know that?” Stan replied. He was getting a bit hot under the collar, and it wasn’t just because the humidity was hovering at eighty percent, and the ambient temperature was closing in on ninety degrees.

  “I had a chat with Monty’s Ex,” said Bitsie, “back when this whole mess started.”

  Bitsie stole another look at Jennifer’s body and wished that she hadn’t.

  “And?” said Stan, a bit impatiently.

  “She mentioned something about how Monty liked to take their kids out to Brinks Lake.”

  “So?” asked Liz. She was looking a bit green around the gills and was shielding her face with the turned-up collar of her blouse.

  “When Jennifer disappeared after accusing Monty of murder, I thought, well—“

  “That Monty might have killed her.” Stan finished Bitsie’s sentence for her.

  “Yes,” Bitsie said. “Then I asked myself if I were Monty and I’d killed somebody, where would be the first place I’d think of to get rid of the body?”

  “Your favorite fishing hole?”

  “Bingo!”

  “When you two are done messing around with corpses,” said Liz, making a beeline for what there was of the trail out, “I’ll be waiting for you in the car.”

  “I’m calling this in,” said Stan, raising his phone to his ear.

  Chapter Ten

  It was time to try again to get Bill to talk, preferably in person, Bitsie decided.

  Monty was safely behind bars. The police were holding him without bail, seeing as he was now the prime suspect in not one but two murders, not to mention an armed robbery. Jennifer was no longer a danger to anyone, not even to herself. Now, perhaps, Bill would feel safe enough to tell everything he knew.

  In the end, it was Stan who convinced Bill to come back. Stan called Gwen—using the number that Bitsie had given him—and Gwen convinced Bill to talk to Stan. After that, it was only a matter of Gwen buying Bill a bus ticket from Dallas.

  Less than twenty-four hours after Jennifer’s body was found, Stan was on his way to pick Bill up from the Fayetteville bus station. Bitsie rode to the station with Stan, accompanied by Kipper in the back seat.

  “Looking forward to seeing your favorite human?” Bitsie craned her neck around to address Kipper, who sat upright on the seat with his nose pressed expectantly against the window glass. He wriggled in response to her inquiry, although he could hardly be expected to know that he was about to be reunited with his master.

  “So, Bill really refused to tell you anything on the phone?” said Bitsie.

  “Bill doesn’t trust phones,” Stan replied.

  “Aliens have ‘em tapped?”

  “Something like that,” said Stan. “I expect Bill will tell us everything he knows in his own good time.”

  Bitsie nodded.

  “But,” Stan continued, “before he does, I’d like to hear your version of wha
t you think happened. You know, just to prevent one of those I-told-you-so moments that featured so consistently in our childhood. You really do take sibling rivalry seriously.“

  “Sibling rivalry?” Bitsie protested. “What rivalry? I refuse to admit to any rivalry.”

  “You do, do you? Alright, then. In that case, I’m sure you won’t mind telling me exactly what you believe happened the night Marco died.”

  “Shall I?” Bitsie teased. “But there isn’t time. We’re almost at the bus station.”

  “We’re early,” said Stan, as he pulled into an empty parking space. “The bus isn’t getting in for another ten minutes.”

  “Alright,” said Bitsie. “I’ll tell you what I think happened, although there are a couple of little things niggling at me that I still don’t have figured out.”

  “Go ahead, Sis. Wow me!” Stan turned off the ignition, removed his keys, folded his arms across his chest, and gave Bitsie his full attention.

  “I think both Jennifer and Monty had a motive for murdering Marco,” said Bitsie, then paused for dramatic effect.

  “Yes, well, so do I,” said Stan. “But which of them actually did it and how?”

  “They both did,” said Bitsie. “They planned it together.”

  “But they didn’t even know each other. I mean, that surveillance camera at the ATM put them both in the vicinity of the bakery at the same time, but—“

  “No. They didn’t know each other very long before they conspired to murder Marco, but it doesn’t take long, does it?” said Bitsie.

  “Doesn’t take long for what?”

  “For two people to bond over a common enemy.”

  “Enemy? Marco had just fired Monty. But what did Monty have to gain by Marco’s death?” Stan asked.

  “I think it was money,” said Bitsie.

  “Money? Do you think that Monty killed Marco over a few days-worth of disputed wages? Besides, how was he expecting to collect money from a dead man?”

  “It wasn’t the wages he wanted,” Bitsie said. “It wasn’t about the paycheck. I doubt Marco even owed Monty any money at all. I think Jennifer talked Monty into doing her dirty work in return for a cut of the life-insurance money.”