Mystery Dance: Three Novels

by Scott Nicholson

  “Is that a threat, Sheriff?”

  “Nah, consider it an anonymous news tip.” He rang off.

  So the sheriff was reading our paper along with everyone else. Maybe it was time to ask the publisher if we could move to a daily. It all depended on whether he’d paid cash for the Porsche.

  6.

  It was the second victim that spawned the nickname “The Rebel Clipper.”

  A couple of weeks had passed, and police efforts in the first murder had shifted to the missing, mysterious boyfriend. We did our due diligence, tracked down the guy’s name and a mug shot, no criminal record, just another college grad in between jobs and pursuing other opportunities in the wonderful new economy.

  I didn’t grumble too much about running his mug as a person of interest, since Moretz had other crime news crammed around it. The break-ins were causing a restless populace, and the sheriff had arrested a couple of Mohawk-wearing skater punks and charged them. Conveniently for him, they were minors and their names couldn’t be released.

  Moretz wasn’t in the office when the scanner announced a body had been discovered, possible homicide. I texted him and he buzzed back that he was already on the scene. Of course.

  This victim was also a woman, a little older, mid-thirties. She was found sitting in her car behind the county health department, head pitched forward over the steering wheel. Her scarf had been tightly wrapped around her neck, but otherwise she was unharmed.

  Except for being dead, of course.

  Her husband had reported her missing after midnight, according to Moretz’s article. A housewife, no kids. I was glad about the “kids” part, even though we could have squeezed some column inches about the grief counselors swarming into a local school and protecting children from the hard realities of life.

  “Do we want to put in the part about the clippers?” Moretz asked, as we proofed the story.

  “Clippers?”

  “Found at the scene. A little pair of nail clippers with a Rebel flag etched in the handle.”

  “Do you think it’s significant?”

  “Hardison asked me to keep it off the record. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Hmmm. Probably nothing. Maybe this time we throw a bone to the sheriff to keep him from growling.

  “You think it means something? Some sort of symbolism?”

  I waved my hand. “If they get fingerprints, maybe. I don’t think a killer is going to sit around pruning a corpse’s fingernails to protest Northern aggression. ‘The Rebel Clipper’ isn’t in the same league with the Bind Torture Kill guy or the Green River Killer.”

  “Might make a more interesting story, though.” Moretz repeated the phrase aloud. “‘The Rebel Clipper.’ Has a ring to it.”

  “Yeah, like Joe DiMaggio was ‘The Yankee Clipper’ in baseball. But we don’t know if this is the same killer and we just promised the sheriff we’d sit on that little detail.”

  “Since when has a journalist ever kept a promise when it stood in the way of a story?”

  “Good point. If nothing breaks, we’ll run with as the lead Friday. We’ve got three hours before press time. Get on the phone to some retired FBI types for a quote.”

  7.

  The sheriff wasn’t too happy with the story, but it helped him out in one way. The SBI sent a couple more agents in, which allowed the sheriff to deflect some of the blame for the unsolved murders. More passive voice.

  “Progress has been made, but the state boys asked me to keep a lid on it,” he said at his press conference. “Leads have been pursued, but that’s about all I can say.”

  Seven newspapers were represented in the little gray-walled conference room in the courthouse basement. Moretz was there for the Picayune, of course, sitting up front with his laptop, and I’d sent Fitz with her camera for the obligatory official-at-the-podium shot.

  Kavanaugh was on hand with her stub of a pencil scratching at her notebook, glowering at me for coming up with the Rebel Clipper. I figured there was a rule that a serial killer ought to be named by a local, not by somebody who just wandered into town for a cheap thrill.

  Two of the network affiliates had news teams on hand, and those guys like to take over a room, arranging chairs, setting up lights, and sticking cameras in front of print reporters, whom they regarded as only slightly above movie bloggers on the media hierarchy.

  Three radio stations had parked microphones on the table in front of the sheriff, and he looked at them occasionally as if they were about to spray water at him. Hardison was clearly uncomfortable with all the attention, chewing on the edge of his Styofoam coffee cup and at one point letting a white pebble fall from his lips.

  “Sheriff,” Kavanaugh shouted as he rose to leave.

  He blinked as if not realizing someone might actually ask a question at a press conference. “Huh?”

  “The Rebel Clipper. Do you think it’s some sort of political statement?”

  “What, like a terrorist or something?”

  “A fingernail clipper is one thing, but a Rebel flag is still controversial.”

  “Murder is controversial,” the sheriff said. Nice quote.

  I checked to make sure Moretz wrote it down. It might be the only five-syllable word Hardison ever employed, though he’d only used four of those syllables.

  “Anything linking the two victims?”

  “We’ve not as yet ascertained the two are connected.”

  “Except the fact they were both murdered,” one of the stand-up news guys said, slicking back his wet-looking hair in preparation for going on camera and pretending like he knew more than the sheriff. TV types like to be provocative, hoping they can get a few seconds of emotion for the vacant-eyed zombies in their audience.

  “Like I said, the scenes have been investigated and the evidence has been collected,” the sheriff said. “Nothing else can be shared at this point in time.”

  Moretz was busy typing as the sheriff waded out of the room. Kavanaugh edged over to me and nudged me like a rugby player. “That your whiz kid?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s John. This case is going to give us a sweep of next year’s association awards.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Kavanaugh said. “Rookies are strong out of the gate but they make mistakes when they try to pace themselves for the distance.”

  “You only came up from Raleigh to pad your mileage.” I wasn’t going to let her intimidate me, though she did, a little.

  “No, the boss told me to take a few days and write a series. They’ll be talking about it all over the state. If the cops link the two killings, then you’re going to start getting some big boys in here, Fox News and CNN. Then we’ll see how fast you and John Moretz get pushed to the side.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but it was likely to happen. Even a homegrown hero like Hardison would have his head turned by a chance to go national. All I could do was hope the Rebel Clipper stayed small but still sold papers.

  “What say we go out to dinner and compare notes?” I said.

  She winced. “That could be dangerous.”

  “This is strictly professional.” I tested a lie. “We’re not competing, since our audiences don’t overlap.”

  “What about Moretz?”

  “He’s got to cover the town council tonight.”

  “Well, you probably know more than you’re putting in the paper.”

  “Actually, less.”

  She frowned.

  “Kidding,” I said. Those big-city reporters sure take everything seriously.

  “So, where do you think he’ll strike again?”

  “First, we’re not sure this is a serial killer, and second, this could be some sort of coincidence.”

  “The coincidence is Sycamore Shade has averaged about one murder per year for the last decade, and now there are two in the last couple of weeks? And a lot more violent deaths since Moretz got here?”

  “We can get into all that over dinner.”

  “Th
anks, but I don’t fraternize the enemy.”

  A she pushed her way out of the room, one of the television heads yelled at her for shoving the camera during his stand-up. She didn’t even pause, just slapped her notebook against her hip loudly enough to disturb the radio people who were calling in their live reports.

  I wish I could afford to hire her, but no way could I compete with big-city salaries. Besides, even though she shot me down on dinner, Moretz was eating her lunch.

  And I don’t think she liked it.

  8.

  Victim Number Three floated up seventeen days later.

  Moretz had been fidgety around the office, killing time with a few drug busts, an exclusive interview with the second victim’s husband, and the arraignment of the mayor’s son, in which Wilbanks pleaded “Not guilty” and had his bond set at $50,000.

  Kelsey Kavanaugh filed her series entitled “Murder shakes sleepy mountain town,” and life was more or less back to normal.

  Loraine Shumate, 33, was found on the far side of the lake in the state park, less than a mile from the first murder scene. A couple of boys with fishing poles and cigarettes discovered the body, but Moretz somehow found out and got there before the police and rescue squad. I’d asked him to check around the first murder scene, so he must have been pretty close when the call came in.

  To his credit, he resisted the urge to drag the body out of the water and search it, although he did get several dozen pictures of the face-down corpse stuck in the muddy reeds, a ragged gash around her neck. He also talked to one of the boys, who asked if she had been killed “by that Clipper guy.”

  Shumate’s throat had been slashed, probably with a straight razor. She was dressed in a lavender jogging suit, her hair streaming out in a ponytail. She must have been putting in some miles on the wooded trails when the killer jumped out, gave her an extra smile, and tossed her in the lake.

  A jurisdictional squabble erupted, with Hardison trying to seize the case while the SBI pulled their “state property” card and claimed superior resources. Both the sheriff and the SBI yelled at Moretz, with Hardison threatening to charge my reporter with tampering with evidence. But Moretz stuck with it until the body was pulled from the water and loaded into an ambulance two hours later.

  Best of all, we still had an hour before deadline.

  “No clippers at the scene?” I asked, mentally crossing my fingers as Moretz jogged into his cubicle.

  “None so far.”

  “What else you got?” He’d texted me a couple of details, but his style was to downplay everything until he had enough facts to tell a story.

  “I overheard Hardison tell the SBI that the same person had killed all three people, but one of the suits said serial killers tended to use the same modus operandi,” he said, bustling into his cubicle and dumping his laptop on his desk. “Because it was so close to the first scene, the SBI thinks this one was either a copycat or else a bait and switch.”

  “What, a killing to throw the cops off the trail?”

  “No. Like maybe the first two murders were committed to cover this one up.”

  “Did you get this on the record?”

  He slid behind his desk and opened his laptop. “No, Chief, but I heard it with my own ears, and that’s good enough for me.”

  I had been pushing Moretz, but some little niggling whisper of the word “ethics” echoed around in my skull. After laying out the obits and then the comics page, where the Peanuts strip was the usual jumble of panels apparently tossed together at random, I needed a cold slap in the face.

  “John, we can’t just run with an overheard conversation,” I said. “Do they have a suspect?”

  “A dozen or so. Shumate is one of the Wade Murphy heirs.”

  “Murphy? The metal furniture guy?”

  We’d written several business features on the successful local factory, which used patented designs to create a high-end brand of decorative tables, chairs, sconces, fireplace accessories, wine racks, chandeliers, and other things normal people didn’t need.

  The spin on the story was always how Murphy’s American ingenuity had bucked the trend that had sent most other manufacturing jobs overseas. But it looked to me like he’d employed the solid American ideals of exploiting your workers, producing on the cheap, and getting accountants to make everything look good on paper.

  Either way, he’d achieved enough wealth to open three regional factories and was the fourth-largest employer in the county, behind the school system, the hospital, and the county government. And wealth meant motive for murder.

  “That’s the one,” Moretz said.

  The coincidence was a little much. “Didn’t you interview Murphy a couple of days ago for that economic-development piece?”

  “Yeah. He wants the county to buy a parcel for a business park. Save infrastructure costs, he said, and encourage a whole new class of entrepreneurs.”

  “I didn’t see that story in the news folder.”

  “I haven’t filed it yet.”

  We’d have to spike it. We couldn’t run a puff piece while the man’s niece was spread out on the medical examiner’s gurney. Still, I hated to waste the entire interview.

  “Did he happen to say anything prescient?” I asked.

  “Prescient?”

  “Ominous. Like seeing the future.”

  Moretz clicked open the file and scrolled through his notes. “Hmm. ‘You can’t just respond to future conditions, you have to create future conditions.’ That was a jab at the commissioners for cutting the planning department’s budget.”

  I shook my head. “No go. What else?”

  “How about ‘Success is built on tradition, and if you take away tradition, you might as well knock the legs off this chair I’m sitting in’? That was general advice to budding entrepreneurs.”

  “Run with it. But let me think about the conspiracy angle. I don’t want to be irresponsible and let our readers assume somebody killed Loraine Shumate for money.”

  “Chief, you can’t tell people what to assume.” Moretz was already typing, half ignoring me.

  I tried to picture the headline. Woman Found Dead At Lake.

  No sizzle, no sales. At first glance, it would appear to be a drowning. No, that wouldn’t help the publisher pay off his Porsche.

  I had to admit, Heiress Killed In Possible Plot was a grabber. We’d have a lot of gaps, such as figuring out how much Murphy was worth and how much a relative might stand to gain. We also debated whether to use quotes from Hardison or the SBI, since technically they had been talking among themselves and not on the record to Moretz.

  While I thought about it, I flipped through Moretz’s crime-scene photos to choose a centerpiece for the front. The first one on the roll caught my attention. It showed the two boys at the lake, one pointing into the water with his mouth open in surprise.

  I could have IM’ed Moretz but I wanted to see his expression, so I went back to his cubicle. He was typing like a monkey trying to copy Shakespeare.

  “John, that photo of the boys?”

  “Yeah?” he said, not looking up, his tongue poking a little from between his teeth.

  “It almost looks like you were there when they discovered the body.”

  He stopped typing and glared at me. “What are you trying to say?”

  “First on the scene. Every time.”

  “You know how it works. We don’t doctor photos, but we can doctor reality. I staged that, got the boys to show me what they did when they found the body.”

  “Before the cops got there?”

  “Can I help it if the jurisdictional dispute slowed the response time? What if she had been seriously injured and needed a transport?”

  “Yeah,” I said, laughing a little. “Maybe Hardison should put you on the payroll.”

  “Then I could only tell one side of the story,” he said, resuming his typing. “We both know things are never as they appear.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by t
hat and was afraid to ask. Moretz made me afraid a lot.

  I went back into my office and finished laying out the front page. It looked great, moved a ton of copies off the racks, and elicited the obligatory call from Hardison to ask where Moretz had gotten his information.

  Another success. Then why was I feeling sick to my stomach?

  9.

  Moretz became a person of interest shortly before the fourth victim was discovered. The coincidences had piled up until even Hardison could no longer ignore them.

  When Moretz told me the sheriff had requested a private meeting, my bullshit detector started clanging. Hardison had never, in his nine years of tenure, voluntarily summoned a member of the media, with the exception of his rare press conferences.

  Sure, he always had someone phone in a tip any time a photogenic drug bust was scheduled, but he didn’t seek out bonus quality time with the press.

  “You think he’s going to give you an exclusive?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” Moretz said, checking the battery-charge level on his digital camera.

  “But you’ve been a step ahead of his department the whole time. It’s more likely he wants to find out what you know.”

  Moretz almost grinned, and the expression was a cross between a possum’s and a caged politician’s. “We’re making him look bad, aren’t we?”

  “He’s already threatened me with a frame-up.”

  Moretz glared at me, sizing me up. Newspaper editors were like battlefield generals: they never asked their subordinates to tackle any job they wouldn’t do themselves. “Are you going to bust him on it? An editorial, maybe.”

  I waved him off. “It was veiled. Nothing solid, and his word against mine. He’s been here longer. Plus, he’s under a lot more pressure than we are.”

  That pacified Moretz, though his eyes retained the dark depth that chilled me to the core.

  “Hold a hole for me,” he said. “I’ll get a story out of this one way or another.”

  “Good. If we don’t get any fresh developments on the Rebel Clipper, we’re going to have to lead with a United Way fundraiser. And nobody buys the paper to read about charities.”