Deadly Production (Mapleton Mystery Book 4)

by Terry Odell

  “I don’t suppose one of them was Who do you need killed?”

  Solomon glared at him. “No, but a few about why you think your suggestion would make a good post topic. Innocuous enough. Wants you to include specific points of interest, restaurants, lodging, scenery, activities. But I’ve got this theory.” He showed Gordon the printout. “See, there’s this field on the form where you’re supposed to fill in where you heard about the newsletter.”

  “Common enough.”

  “Yeah, but I was thinking. What if it’s where you give her the secret password? Let’s say you’ve heard about Paula or her blog as being the gateway to an assassination central for deadbeats. Step one. You go to the blog, leave the comment worded like all the others. Then you get her response and you go on to step two, which is answering her questions, which includes the field asking how you heard about them. Somewhere along the line, you’ve got the code word for that one, and you get admitted to the next level. I figure that’s where you start working out the details of who needs to be killed, making payments, and the like. It makes sense, right?”

  Gordon gave it some thought while he sipped his coffee. “In theory, yes, it might—and I’m emphasizing might—be workable. What are you and Colfax doing other than seeing if Paula was in Morrison recently? Or at Red Rocks?”

  “He’s going to put the geeks on trying to track the IPs of the people who posted comments asking whether the blog would cover a particular place where a homicide ended up happening. I’ve sent him all my data. But I’ll bet we’ll find there are a lot of layers to peel away. Like the Guinness Book of World Records for giant onions. Anyone who’s set up this kind of network—”

  “If it’s for real,” Gordon said.

  “Right. If it’s for real, there would probably be lots of safeguards. No matter how these people are finding out about it, they’re likely being told to send their comments from places like libraries, or other public computer sites. And they’re probably routing through two or three proxies. If she’s been getting away with this—”

  “You’ve got her convicted already, have you, Ed?”

  “Okay, I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ve got it right, but damn, the pieces seem to fit.”

  “You know better than to make the facts fit your theory. Take it slow, document everything, and don’t do anything without informing Colfax.”

  Solomon’s eyes lit up like a kid coming downstairs on Christmas morning to finding Santa had given him everything on his list. “You mean I’m free to pursue this? Officially?”

  “After your responsibilities to Mapleton PD have been satisfied.”

  “I’m on my own time this weekend,” Solomon said. “I know there are rules about unauthorized overtime, but—”

  “But you’re not working for Mapleton until Monday.” Gordon finished his coffee and set the mug down. He gathered Solomon’s paperwork and put it into the folder. “Make me copies.”

  Gordon couldn’t help but smile as Solomon practically danced out of the office. A happy officer was a good officer.

  But now, he had his own case to deal with. His pool of suspects was going to be leaving soon, and he was no closer to finding the person who’d broken into Marianna Spellman’s trailer and taken her computer than he’d been the day they’d discovered it.

  The phone interrupted. Gordon checked the caller ID. From the county lab. Calling on a Saturday?

  Gordon snatched up the receiver. “Chief Hepler.”

  “Xander Lewis. Crime Lab. We got the report on your rush jobs from TechLabs, so I pushed ours through to compare.”

  Why did Gordon get the feeling it was to prove the private lab wrong? “I take it you found something?”

  “Yes. You do know this won’t hold up in court until we get the paperwork filled out, but I thought you’d want to know there were traces of citalopram hydrobromide in hot chocolate taken from cups in what was designated as lounge number one.”

  Ignoring the remark that hinted Gordon didn’t know how things worked in putting together a case, he grabbed the files and found his diagram of all the vehicles in the Village. Lounge number one was the trailer where the higher-echelon Seesaw people hung out. Not high up enough on the totem pole to warrant their own RVs, but high enough to consider themselves above the little people. Or so Mai Phan had explained it. She’d also said there were no fixed admission policies, so finding something in that lounge didn’t eliminate anyone.

  But they’d been looking at coffee. Finding the drug in hot chocolate was a new path to follow.

  “Can you determine whose cups they were?” Gordon asked. “Prints, DNA?”

  “In the works,” Xander said. “However, unless these people are in AFIS or another database we have access to, you’re going to have to give us exemplars if we’re going to identify them. I can tell you, one of the cups had bright red lipstick on it.”

  Marianna wore red lipstick. Then again, Gordon had noticed a number of the people on camera, both actors and extras, wore lipstick that would fall into the red category. “The contents of the victim’s purse included a lipstick. Can you run a test to see if they’re the same? If they match, we’d have a pretty good indicator of how she ingested the drug.”

  Gordon realized he probably sounded like he didn’t think the tech knew his job, either. But one couldn’t ever assume anything. And he had no idea how things were divvied up for processing, whether the tech had even seen the contents of Marianna’s purse.

  “I’ll do that,” Xander said. “Should have results later today. The DNA will take longer.”

  Gordon explained the DNA samples and fingerprints he’d collected during interviews. “If you run those as well, they’ll serve as your exemplars. Or, I can call the studio, see if they’ll authorize their private lab to run the additional tests, if you can’t handle it right away. With the understanding the job’s not court-ready until the paperwork is done, of course. But these people are going to be leaving here soon, and the more information I have, the better the odds we can find our suspect before everyone disappears.”

  After a drawn-out sigh, as though a balloon was deflating, Xander responded. “My wife’ll kill me—I told her I’d be back by noon—but our kid’s got a stomach bug, and I figure making it up to her later beats dealing with puke and crap all day.”

  “As if you don’t do it on the job?” Gordon said.

  “Yeah, but that’s evidence. It doesn’t cry, and cling, and puke on you. It’s just there. And I don’t think I can sit through Frozen one more time.”

  Gordon grinned and left it at that. The guy’s relationship with his wife was none of Gordon’s business. Which, of course, had him thinking about what it would be like if he and Angie had kids, and who would be the one taking off work when they were sick.

  Save it for when it becomes an issue. Hell, you haven’t even thought about a ring yet.

  But the fact that he was thinking about not thinking about it meant he was thinking about it. He’d screwed up once with Cynthia, and didn’t want to screw up a second time. Solving a murder was much less complicated than dealing with a relationship.

  He went to the war room and paced in front of the whiteboard. He wrote hot chocolate and contemplated connections as he resumed his pacing, tossing the marker from hand to hand.

  Lily Beckett had confessed to taking hot chocolate packets. It was possible people knew she liked it, so could she have been the target? Marianna Spellman’s purse revealed candy bar wrappers. Her penchant for chocolate might have been known as well. And Gordon sure as hell didn’t want to have to start from scratch with Lily as a target, which meant finding people who would want her out of the way.

  He remembered his words to Solomon. Don’t make the facts fit the theory.

  So, someone wants to drug Lily. Gordon couldn’t figure out a logical way to introduce crushed pills into a packet of hot chocolate mix. Surely anyone would notice it had been tampered with. No, someone had to have put the drug into the hot
chocolate itself. Offered it to Marianna? Would she have accepted it? When he’d watched her eat at the diner that first morning, she’d avoided touching anything with sugar or fat in it. Was that her public persona? Did she binge in private? Maybe she’d already had a huge breakfast at the B and B. Or was she feeling “off” that day?

  And what about Yolanda Orozco? The drug affected people differently, so it was possible she’d had a dose equivalent to the one Marianna had taken, but hadn’t collapsed. Maybe she’d had more food in her stomach, slowing down the absorption of the drug. Had she gone to the lounge, somehow ended up with the tainted cocoa?

  He slammed the marker into the tray. Questions. Questions. More questions. An answer or two would be nice right about now. Starting with where the hell was Marianna’s damn computer? And who’d broken into her RV, and why? And had anyone discovered what was missing?

  At least that last one he might be able to answer. They’d been pulled in six directions, and he’d forgotten about the full personnel file Ethan Lang had emailed him.

  He went to his office and pulled up the files on his computer. He scrolled down the spreadsheet. Holy Crap. If this was a bare-bones production, he’d hate to think how many people worked on a high-budget film. There was no indication of which people were in Mapleton on location, and which weren’t. He pulled up the spreadsheet their civilian patrol volunteer had made using Dawson’s list of everyone on the Mapleton shoot. Then there was a third one, a listing of all the pages they’d found in Marianna Spellman’s RV.

  If nothing else, all the work he’d put in doing budget spreadsheets had upped his skill level considerably. He started sorting and combining data. When he was finished, he’d found five names on the Mapleton production list that didn’t have matching paperwork in Marianna’s files. He wrote them down, and then let it roll through his mind. When he was working on budgets, he crunched numbers, but when he presented them to the Town Council, he went beyond the stark figures. It was as much why they needed something as it was how much it would cost. All he had here was the summarized information he’d asked for, because at the time, he needed names and phone numbers. But like you had to go to a crime scene to get the feel of a case, he wanted to see the original data. Was there more he wasn’t seeing on those sheets of paper beyond names, phone numbers, and emergency contact information?

  Chapter 29

  Gordon found the computer images of all the paperwork Solomon had photographed before sending them to the county lab to be fingerprinted. Because he hated jumping from image to image on the screen, he sent the first half dozen to his printer so he could compare them side-by-side more easily.

  Based on all the different handwriting, Gordon felt safe in assuming each person had filled out his or her own sheet. But on some of them, he noticed there were additional markings. There were large Xs in the top right corner of two. On two others, there were numbers and letters near the bottom of the page. They all seemed to be done by the same person. A code? A way Marianna categorized people? Curious, he printed out the rest of them. More with Xs, more with cryptic notations.

  Now came the fun part. Seeing if there were any connections. He remembered playing a game with his grandmother when he was about four. She’d give him a box of assorted buttons from her sewing kit and he’d spend rainy afternoons grouping them by his own arbitrary classification systems. He’d line them up by size, then by color, by shape, or by the number of holes in the center.

  Not much different from detective work, looking at all the pieces and seeing how you could relate them to each other. Often the relationships were far-fetched, but every now and again, you’d see a connection and everything fell into place.

  He needed more room, so he took the papers to the war room and spread them out on the table. Where to start? First, he went through all the ones with Xs in the upper corner. Staring at them, he tried to find some commonality. Males and females. Some actors, some tech crew. Addresses were primarily California, emergency contacts all over the place.

  Buttons were easier.

  He’d spent about twenty minutes moving papers around when something else hit him. Solomon had photographed the fronts, because that’s where the names and phone numbers were. But what about the backs? He grabbed the papers and went to his office to call Xander.

  When the tech answered, Gordon jumped in. “Before you say anything, no, I’m not bugging you about the lipstick matches. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Depends.”

  “I’ve got photographs of the personnel paperwork we took from Marianna Spellman’s RV.”

  “A bit of a mess, as I recall,” Xander said. “They went to be fingerprinted, but it wasn’t high priority. They’re probably in the queue along with a bazillion other pieces of evidence.”

  “That’s fine. I’m not interested in prints now. What I need to know is whether there was anything on the back of any of those sheets. Sooner rather than later.”

  A brief pause, some clicks of a keyboard, and then Xander came back on the line. “I’ll have to go dig them out. Might take twenty, thirty minutes to locate them and go through channels. Everything’s its own department here. You want me to call you with what I find?”

  “What I’d like is for you to fax me any of those sheets that have writing on the back.”

  “Fax? Do people still do that? What if I scan them and email them?”

  “As long as I get them. Of course, that’s assuming any have writing on the back.” Gordon thought for a moment. “You’ll have to send both sides, so I can match them with what I have here.”

  “All right. I’ll tell the wife I’ve been saddled with more unexpected work.”

  Gordon couldn’t tell if the man was glad to have an excuse to be away, or feeling guilty. “Make it up to her. Bring her some roses. Chocolate. Dinner. I’ll pick up the tab. For one, not all.”

  “Well—”

  “Within reason, Xander. Within reason. And for God’s sake, take over kid duty for the night.”

  With Xander’s promise to dig out the paperwork, Gordon ended the call and opened a blank spreadsheet. He made a list of all the notations. Maybe seeing them all lined up would give his brain a jolt.

  Alphabet soup was more like it. None looked like acronyms he was familiar with. He picked a coding and went to the pages themselves. M appeared most often, so he separated all the sheets with that code. Did the placement matter? Most of the Ms were in the right-hand margin, about a third of the way down the page. Nearest to the phone number field, if that made a difference. Hell, for all he knew, the M was her initial, and she was noting she’d read the page, or it was complete, or ready to be filed.

  He set aside the ones with only M notations. Some also had 2s on them. He went through the stack again to see whether any other pages had that code. He found four.

  The 2s were below the Ms on the pages with both, and in approximately the same place on the ones with only the numeral. So, placement must mean something. Easier to find, was his immediate thought.

  Find. That triggered a thought. They’d found the paperwork scattered all over the floor, but hadn’t talked about where it had come from. Offices were full of paperwork. Had these papers been filed somewhere? They weren’t three-hole punched, so she wasn’t keeping them in binders.

  Or were they stacked in a “To Be Filed” place? Had they piled up because she didn’t have time—or the desire—to file them? Gordon knew if he didn’t have Laurie, he’d have six months of paperwork waiting for the dreaded filing. But leaving them around didn’t go with what he’d seen of Marianna’s personality.

  Or, had they been filed, and that’s where their yet-to-be-determined suspect had found them? Gordon couldn’t remember seeing file folders amidst the mess in Marianna’s RV. He searched his computer for the pictures Solomon had taken. As thorough as any official crime scene tech, he’d documented everything, including the drawers of Marianna’s desk. The bottom drawer served as a file cabinet, with hanging folders, m
ost of them empty. A few held colored file folders, but they weren’t labeled. Gordon clicked through more of the images to see whether or not Solomon had zoomed in any closer, or taken pictures of the contents. Because he hadn’t, Gordon was inclined to think the folders were empty.

  But assumptions were a surefire way to send you down the wrong track, so Gordon called his officer.

  “Ed, sorry to bother you, but I’ve been looking at the pictures of all the paperwork we found in Marianna Spellman’s RV.” He explained about the notations and the file folders in the drawer. “Do you remember if there were papers in any of them?”

  After a pause, Solomon said, “Not that I recall. I figured the ones on the floor had probably come out of the drawer, but at the time, I was busy getting pictures of all those sheets. Maybe Xander and company did.”

  “I’ve got another puzzle,” Gordon said. He went through the markups on the paperwork. “I can’t figure out whether they’re pertinent to the case, or merely notes Marianna made for herself.”

  “The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Solomon said. “I’ve hit a wall with the Deadbeat Dad case. I can come in if you want.”

  Gordon did some quick math, envisioned the mayor’s frown when he read the manpower reports. Tough. “I’ll deal with the overtime. I’m sure the mayor understands we can’t solve cases like this working forty-hour weeks.”

  “I’m on my way. You want lunch? My wife made lasagna last night, and there’s tons left over.”

  Gordon’s stomach urged him to say yes. “Sounds good.”

  He pulled up his budget spreadsheets, began juggling numbers.

  Solomon had just arrived when Xander called. “I’ve got that information you wanted.”

  “Hang on,” Gordon said. “Ed Solomon’s here. I’m putting you on speaker.”