Stone Cold Crazy (Lil & Boris #4) (Lil and Boris Mysteries)

by Shannon Hill

  But it could wait. There were more EMTs and cops showing up, flooding the church with hands, help. I hunted up Tom and joined in the search for survivors.

  ***^***

  The fire finally died near sunset. By dawn, we had accounted for all but two of Sayers’ 196 residents. One of those was Alan Quinn’s brother, Ray. The other was Ray’s next-door neighbor, whose house was a cinder. Four other houses had also burned to the ground. Twelve more had taken significant blast damage, and were as good as leveled.

  Thankfully, Sayers was a devout town. Over half its residents had been in the shuttered church when Ray Quinn’s house and repair shop blew up. Otherwise, we’d have sent more than thirty-seven people to hospitals. The rest of the injuries were minor enough to not require anything more than first aid.

  There were six dead.

  I don’t know how I drove home without falling asleep. There was a small cooler on my doorstep. I recognized Bobbi’s kindness in the vegetarian kofta and rice, Aunt Marge in the raspberry-pomegranate smoothie.

  I expected Boris to be all over me, but he took one sniff and backed away, mouth open in disgust. Once I’d showered, he crawled up onto the bed with me while I ate and drank, then curled against my hip in a kitten-huddle. Poor guy. I hadn’t had him with me much lately.

  I slept about four hours, then went into the office. It gave me a distraction from the images my memory was trying to throw at me.

  Punk was there, on-duty, filling out a form that presumably had to do with why Eddie Brady was snoring away in a cell. I tried to remember to be angry, but I didn’t have the energy. I deposited Boris on his cat condo for a good scratch, and hit the lunchroom for a cup of instant hot cocoa. It’s Aunt Marge’s mix, a sort of fudge substance you melt in a microwave and add milk to. I was stirring it when Boris appeared and leapt onto the counter next to me. I poured a little milk into a cup, but he wasn’t interested. His mismatched eyes were fixed on Punk, who’d followed him in. Punk fidgeted uneasily before blurting out, “Um. Lil. I just…‌I mean, I should tell you…”

  I spared us both by cutting him off. “Punk. I’m six feet tall, I’m about as girly as a two-by-four, and I’m a cop. I don’t need an explanation for being stood up. An apology might be nice, but there’s a reason it’s a bad idea to date co-workers.” I offered him a crooked smile. “You finish up with Eddie, I’ll take a quick patrol around town.”

  I took my cat and my cocoa out to my cruiser. I rolled out to my speed trap on Turner Gap Road, and called Vicky Weed to ask her to come to my office the next day. It was good, being able to rely on my job to distract me from my troubles. There’s not much you see as a cop that doesn’t convince you your life could be worse.

  14.

  Vicky Weed did not like sitting in our lunchroom with Boris perched on the table by my notepad. She smiled, but it was a tight, fake smile that I could tell made her face hurt. The folding metal chair wasn’t a winner, either. She squirmed from one hip to another, until I asked, “Would you like a cushion?”

  “No, thank you,” she snapped. “Why am I here, precisely?”

  “Precisely,” I replied, “because there’s been a couple of questions raised. First off, how long were you sexually involved with Bill Lloyd?”

  I’d read her correctly. She whitened to her hairline, and her eyes briefly unfocused. “I…‌I don’t…‌I don’t know what you mean.”

  I hadn’t slept well, or enough, for three nights by then. I said simply, “Stairwell 3. Not so private.”

  The blood came back to her face in a wash of crimson. She uttered a thick moan. I had a premonition, skidded back, grabbed the trash basket, and thrust it at her.

  She threw it at my head.

  Boris exploded.

  Using one hand to deflect the waste basket and one to grab for Boris gave me a great grip on the basket and a whole bunch of no cat. I could hear Vicky Weed screaming words I was pretty sure she didn’t give the kids for their practice college exams. I hurried around the table, thinking the worst, but Boris had exercised a little restraint for a change. He’d given Vicky a good clawing, then scuttled off into the corner. His tongue worked furiously against his paws, and he started to gag.

  I was immediately alarmed. “What the hell?”

  Vicky Weed shot me and Boris a glare so venomous it ought to have left a mark. She sniffed with disdain as she sat up and straightened her shirt. “I had a massage this morning, there’s peppermint in the oil.”

  Oh boy. I winced as Boris threw up‌—‌a cat vomiting is one of the grossest noises on earth‌—‌and took Vicky Weed by the arms. “You,” I said, “are under arrest.”

  “Me?” she shrieked. “Your cat attacked me!”

  “You assaulted me,” I reminded her. “You have the right to remain silent.”

  “Let go of me! I am not a criminal!”

  Strangely, the law didn’t agree, but I eased my grip. “Care to make a deal?”

  I felt her muscles trembling with tension. So much for that massage. “What do you want?” she hissed.

  “You tell me the truth about Bill Lloyd.”

  “That’s not your business.”

  “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney…”

  She caved in when I asked if she understood these rights. I was mildly impressed. Most people don’t make it past the right to remain silent.

  “We started…‌getting involved three years ago. It wasn’t sexual at first. Then it was.”

  I let her sit down again. I even handed her the first aid kit so she could deal with the scratches Boris gave her. I didn’t want to, but she was the type who’d sue. “How long did it go on? The sexual aspect, I mean.”

  “Twenty-three months.” She smiled wanly, bitterly. “I tried to break it off twice, but…‌You don’t know what he’s like. It was like…‌we were…” Her gaze fell, twisted inward, and her hand drooped to the table, the alcohol swab falling from her fingers. “He was magnificent. Nothing like Adam. He has so much passion. Bill does, I mean. Adam has a good heart but there’s no fire in him. Just none.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “so you were in love with Bill Lloyd.”

  Her head came up, her nostrils flared. “Love? Bill? No. No. Fire’s fun, but I don’t love it.”

  “And how did Bill feel about you?”

  She colored prettily. “Oh, he wanted me to divorce Adam, live happily ever after, all that. He called me his soulmate.” She smiled, in a self-congratulatory way. “It was very poetic. But of course I couldn’t divorce Adam. We have the kids, a life.”

  I took a stab at it. “You only like to play with fire, not live with it?”

  Vicky’s eyes flashed bright and cruel. “Don’t mock me.”

  I made sure the first aid kit was out of her reach, and scooped Boris up onto the table. Psychological warfare is never beneath me. “How did Bill Lloyd take it when you broke it off?”

  “Oh, he was upset for a few days, wouldn’t say hello, but he took it fine. When we came back from spring break, he was perfectly civilized.”

  That seemed to fit with what Bee May said. “How was he before spring break?”

  She hesitated. “Well, he wasn’t happy. It’s understandable. It’s a difficult situation.”

  “How were you before spring break?”

  She looked down at the table. “I was very upset.”

  Boris’s tail thwapped twice. I grinned to myself. “You were relieved.”

  She flinched. Gotcha.

  “Did he really take it well?”

  “Of course.”

  Boris’s tail shuddered.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “No! No, my God!”

  Boris’s tail stayed quiet.

  “What did he do, then?”

  She finally looked me in the eye. “He said he’d never love anyone else the same way. He said…‌what we had was too special to end. But
he was upset, I understood.”

  I struck. “Then why did it make you uneasy?”

  Vicky Weed’s composure teetered but did not slip. “I don’t know. Something in his eyes, I think. Too much…‌fire.”

  “Enough to blow up your house?”

  Vicky Weed froze. Her hand went up to her mouth, and dropped again. “Oh my God. Oh my God. He wouldn’t. It was those political nuts. He wouldn’t!”

  “Maybe not. But it has to be considered.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh God. If Adam finds out, I’ll die. I’ll just die. I can’t lose him!”

  Aunt Marge would’ve been proud. I actually didn’t say out loud that she should’ve thought of that before she screwed around.

  ***^***

  I was talking it over with Tom when Howard and Newsome walked into the office. “Sheriff,” said Howard, “thought I’d give you a copy in person, seeing as it was your front door the Quinns went for.”

  I glanced at the papers he handed me. “Preliminary on the Sayers explosion,” I told Tom as I scanned through. “God save us. No wonder it left a crater.”

  Howard dropped onto our couch. Guy looked like hell. “From what we can tell so far, he had some old motor oil and a lot of different chemicals in the repair shop, typical car stuff, a lot of it petroleum or alcohol based. Fuel line additives and brake fluids, you get the idea. And it’s apparently where he and his brother were building their pipe bombs, we found some of the same pipe used on your front door. And the Weed house, though that’s not saying much, you can get it almost anywhere.”

  Tom had come to read over my shoulder. “What do you think happened, then? He fumbled a pipe bomb and it all went up?”

  “Best guess, yes. Our guys think he had a whole stash of pipe bombs, and when one went, it was enough to set off the others. Maybe trying to hide them from us. No idea.” Howard shrugged wearily, while Newsome paced restlessly. “And then the used motor oil went. I don’t know what that was doing there, but according to a few neighbors, he claimed he sent it to be recycled. My thought is, he was planning something big.”

  “Yeah,” said Newsome, “a big bang.”

  We pretended not to hear him. “Anything to tie it to the Weed case?” asked Tom.

  “Yes and no. The fragments of pipe bombs we’ve recovered aren’t terribly sophisticated. That’s not congruent with the Weed house evidence. On the other hand, everyone in Sayers seems to think Ray Quinn was willing to play Tim McVeigh. No target mentioned, but…”

  “Friggin’ rednecks,” muttered Newsome.

  “But,” I said coldly, and loudly, “we still aren’t sure if he and his buddies were behind the bombing of the Weed house.”

  “Sorry,” sighed Howard. “Still, chances are you’re not going to have any more pipe bombs tossed in your direction.”

  He stood. I waited until Newsome had gotten out the door before I reported quickly, “Vicky Weed broke up with her lover in April.”

  He turned, face blanking. “And?”

  “He knows how to use eighteenth-century muskets, and he gave me a funny feeling.”

  Howard inhaled slowly, exhaled even more slowly. “So he knows gunpowder. Damn. Okay. Can you follow it up? We’ve got too many eyes on us.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” I said. “I understand.” And I did. With a US senator possibly at risk, the media were sniffing all over the case. Throw in the flyer, the explosion at Sayers, and everyone who had cable news thought they knew all about it. We’d been lucky that the big networks were happy to buy the footage shot by the Charlottesville and Lynchburg stations instead of showing up themselves. I hadn’t turned on my TV except to use the DVD player, but I’d heard about it from Bobbi and Aunt Marge, who’d heard about it from dang near everyone in three counties.

  I was wondering how to go about questioning Bill Lloyd a second time when Tom cleared his throat and announced, “Lil, Punk wants to talk to you.”

  “I’ll see him when he comes on for his shift,” I said.

  Tom plowed on earnestly, “It’s not about work.”

  I gave him a warning look. Tom reddened but kept going. Brave man. “If he didn’t work here it wouldn’t be my business, but….”

  “It’s settled,” I informed him coolly. “We’re not dating. So there’s no business. Now help me figure out how we approach Bill Lloyd.”

  ***^***

  In the end, we decided on sneaky, under-handed, old-fashioned policing, also known to Aunt Marge as “deceit”. It entailed asking Bill Lloyd a few questions to which we knew the answers, in the guise of asking him questions to which we did not.

  Now and then, I see why my job makes Aunt Marge itch.

  Not to imply that anything went according to plan. Nothing went according to plan. Because, in accordance with the Crazy Sheriff Department SNAFU Principle, and more specifically its Charlie-Fox corollary, all the fecal matter hit the fan at about the same moment.

  Margaret Shiflet of Shiflet Realty called to ask me if I knew my ex-fiancée was buying up all the vacant commercial properties in or near Crazy, and had done so in the name of a big property management company up in Northern Virginia. Time to call my cousin, and go have a chat with Steve.

  Tom took a call on the office line from Becky Shifflett of Happy Tot daycare, reporting that Sean Brady‌—‌Eddie’s luckless son‌—‌was passed out in the marigolds, reeking of liquor.

  We were heading out as Punk came in, and the telephone rang again. I’d made it as far as my car before Punk caught me. “It’s the Weeds,” he said. “Aida’s run away. They saw her hitch a ride on a semi heading north on US 29.”

  Every expletive known to man crowded into my head at once. Not one made it out of my mouth. There are some things you can’t even cuss about.

  15.

  There’s not much in life that scares me, but a teenaged girl hitching rides from truckers rates pretty high on the list. After we notified the state boys, tried to impress on Chief Rucker that the county police might want to keep an eye out, and explained to Vicky Weed why we couldn’t issue an Amber Alert, we headed out to patrol the highway ourselves. Out of minor desperation, I put Aunt Marge on the case. Any woman affiliated with any church within six counties was going to be on the lookout for a sulky teenager, and a black tractor with a white trailer. She mobilized Roger and a few of his buddies, who took to the highway as civilian runaway spotters, some of them armed in ways I overlooked for the sake of domestic peace.

  “We’re screwed,” I told Boris, who was sitting up, watching trees and houses flash by. “You know how many black cabs there are? With white trailers?”

  Boris replied, “Mrrw.” I took that as a “No.”

  We’d been prowling for nearly an hour when Tom called me on the radio. “I got her, she’s okay. Heading to the office.”

  “Meet you there,” I said, and called Aunt Marge so she could notify the troops. When I arrived back in Crazy, Tom was waiting for me outside. “I stuck her in a cell,” he reported. “Seemed safest. She’s ready to run for it.”

  I paused, one hand on the door. “I’m guessing this is more than the usual teenage crap?”

  Tom nodded grimly. “She saw her mother with Bill Lloyd.”

  I whistled. “And she’s kept it to herself this whole time?”

  “Not in school,” Tom clarified. “Yesterday.”

  ***^***

  Aida sulked with enthusiasm. In her situation, I suppose anyone would. Lucky for us, I had a secret weapon. Veronica Turner‌—‌Aunt Marge’s cousin, our phantom cleaning help‌—‌left gooey treats once a week. This week, brownies full of chocolate chips, topped with frosting, and adorned with sprinkles. Custom-made for bribing surly adolescents.

  I popped the paper plate between the bars, along with her choice of water, juice, or diet soda. She took the diet soda. “I’m not going back,” she announced.

  “Motel sucks that bad?”

  She flipped her middle finger at me. Ah, hormones. H
ow they cloud the brain. “Use your words,” I advised. “Now. You saw your mother with Bill Lloyd?”

  She nodded, tears welling up. Rage, grief, disillusionment, petulance: those tears had a lot to express. “She said she was coming up to look at, y’know, the house. The house site. Then she said she had to stop and talk to someone real quick. But I wanted to come.” Her mouth pursed up, eerily like her mother’s. “Mom said I’d be bored, but I’m totally bored already. And I’m sick of the motel. And…” She gave a complex, loose-joined shrug. “So I’m sitting in the car, and it’s like, God, how much does she have to talk about? They’re teachers. What, they’re gonna compare lesson plans? Then I see Mom come out, and I’m all, thank God….” Her shoulders hunched, almost in a spasm. “And it’s Mr. Lloyd. The dick teacher.”

  Tom choked. I studied a spot on the wall. “What happened then?”

  “He was pissed off. So was Mom. She had that face she has when she’s been yelling.”

  “Could you hear anything?”

  She gave me the “you’re a hopeless, outdated dinosaur” look and wiggled a tiny rectangle of plastic in front of me. “I had my iPod. Y’know? Little thing for listening to music?”

  I smiled as benevolently as I could while wanting to slap her. “So you ran away because….”

  “Mom’s a whore!”

  I turned into Aunt Marge. “Language!”

  She crimsoned, but kept going. “It’s true, she is! All the teachers flirt with Mr. Lloyd, they all do, but why’s Mom at his house if she’s not…‌and she always stayed late, and nobody else in the English department ever did, and how’d she know where he lives? And she was in there like half an hour! And when we got back to the hotel, she lied to Dad and said she stopped by Mrs. Lundy’s, and she gave me this look like I had to say she did, and…” Her hands waved all over, crumbs flying. “And I started to say something, and she took me outside, and she said it wasn’t Dad’s business, and I…‌She was scared.” Aida snuffled into her t-shirt. “She’s having an affair, isn’t she.”