by Jean Rabe
Teegan came in soundlessly and set a steaming mug on the corner of the desk. “You ever need to talk, Sheriff, I’m here.” The phone buzzed in the other room and Teegan hurried away. “Probably another slippy-slide into a ditch!”
The screen image shifted to a picture of the bridge that crossed over to Kentucky, so not a static screensaver, but a slideshow. Piper watched it a few minutes while she sipped at the too-hot and not-as-good-as-Nang’s coffee. Other images played across—a rusting tractor in front of a closed mechanic’s shop, an antique store with a wedding dress hanging in the window, children on a slide at the Santa Claus water park.
“Four hundred square miles,” she said. That was the size of sleepy Spencer County. Four hundred and ten, actually, but a dozen of it was water. There were seven hundred and thirty-eight miles of county roads, one hundred and forty-seven highway miles. A lot of department time taken up in driving because calls might be fifty miles away. Fourteen deputies to cover it in three shifts working four days on, two off, rotating shifts so no one was stuck on the night tour forever. The youngest deputy was a year older than her, the oldest was Oren, three were in their fifties, only one woman…other than herself, Jeri Jones, or JJ as everyone called her, ten years with the department, married to the athletic director of the high school. There’d been three murders in the past ten years, JJ had told her.
There was no diversity in the department in Piper’s eyes. One woman…one other woman, all but one of the deputies white; the twenty-four-year old, in his first year with the department, was a very fair-skinned Hispanic with an associate degree in law enforcement. She’d told her father that bothered her, the lack of diversity, said that a department should be a slice of the society it sat in. He laughed and pointed out that judging by the last census, only fifty or so of the county’s whopping twenty-thousand people were Hispanic, and less than two dozen folks were black.
“You should’ve remembered that from when you lived here,” he’d said. “You want diversity, go to Evansville.”
Or Owensboro just across the river, she thought. Piper had left right after high school graduation, enlisted in the Army, and trained at Fort Campbell. She’d not thought about diversity growing up here, but the Army had opened her eyes. When it came time to add another deputy here, she’d address it, census figures or no.
JJ had been the most helpful—and friendly—of her current deputies, meeting Piper and her father for dinner at the country club before Christmas, rattling off statistics. Piper had tried her best to commit them to memory. DUIs were the number one offense in the county—as Oren had pointed out to people gawking on Mr. Delaney’s driveway—then theft, followed by public intoxication, minors drinking, battery, manufacturing meth, marijuana and drug paraphernalia possession, domestic violence calls, and vandalism. Deputies had found twenty meth labs the previous year, a record, all of them apparently run by single individuals who did most of their dealing in Owensboro. Her dad had said the county being so rural made it inviting for the manufacturers to move in, thinking they’d have less chance of being discovered. How many meth labs were operating here that hadn’t been discovered?
Piper intended to delve into the meth problem after the murders. Sleepy Spencer County apparently wasn’t so sleepy after all. Maybe she’d stay too busy to miss Army life.
Probably not.
The laptop screen was back to the image of the courthouse. Piper clicked a few keys and started her Google search. It was the placemat in Nang’s tiny restaurant that gave her the idea, the picture of the pagoda with the website for a Buddhist temple underneath it. That website hadn’t been the correct one; she hadn’t expected to find the needle on her first exploration of the Internet haystack. But it had a link to the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Bangkok. From there, she found a list of monasteries in Thailand, some phone numbers, and after two calls that certainly would have her worried come budget time, she found where Anthony Delaney lived. She left a message for him, finished her coffee, and then levered herself up. Her aches had aches.
Time to take a look at those Christmas cards.
Ten
Piper spotted the Christmas cards in the break room, which also served as the department’s conference room, actually a large all-purpose space that according to her father was the site of the department’s annual potluck and chili contest. She leaned in the doorway. Randy had spread the cards out on two long tables. He was bent over the one with more cards, those taken from Abigail Thornbridge’s house.
“Randy, I thought you were going home?”
He tapped a card in the center of the table, the photo card from Conrad to Abigail.
“Delaney ordered fifty of these sleigh cards from an online company. I found the receipt in his desk, along with five unused cards. So I’d wager he sent out forty-five.” He stood straight and faced her. “In the same drawer I found five unused cards from the year before, and another five from the year before that, all with him and the sleigh, though from different angles and him in different sweaters. Two years ago he wore a reindeer antler ball cap in the shot and had stuck a red ball on his nose. A good bet he’s been mailing out the same number of cards for a while. Chris Hagee said he never knew Conrad to send anything but photo Christmas cards.”
“So we have forty-five suspects,” Piper mused.
“Forty-four,” he corrected with a grin. “One of those recipients was Abigail Thornbridge, and she certainly didn’t kill Delaney. But I’m thinking she was killed on the same day.”
Piper came all the way into the room; the floor was slick and she nearly slipped. Recently polished, the place smelled strongly of pine cleaner. She slumped into the chair across from Randy. “And you know they were killed on the same day because—” Piper guessed that Abigail had been dead about four days or so judging by the ugly condition of the body. This morning Dr. Neufeld had said, “My best guess is that Conrad was killed twenty-eight to thirty-three hours before the Hagees spotted him sitting in the sleigh.” That didn’t equal about the same time; it was off by more than a day.
Randy crossed his arms and let out a slow breath. “Okay, the coroner thinks Conrad was killed sometime on the thirtieth. With me?”
Piper nodded, hoping this wasn’t going to turn into something like a petechial hemorrhage lecture.
“And Sweet Abby T was likely killed on the twenty-ninth, maybe late on the twenty-eighth. I’ve seen enough bodies. Had to be the twenty-ninth or twenty-eighth.”
“Sure, a day apart, killed close, but not the same—”
“Yeah. The same day,” Randy said. “Had to be the same day.” His eyes twinkled and his expression said, c’mon, ask me, but Piper just waited.
“Arnold Washington.”
Piper leaned back as much as the chair allowed and looked up into his face. She noticed a scar along his jaw line, faint, so an old one. Again, she waited.
He seemed disappointed that she wasn’t coaxing the tidbits out of him. “Arnold Washington…Arnie…lives a few doors down from the Delaney’s, in a saltbox he inherited from his mother. He only lives on the first floor.”
She waited some more.
“He’s thirty-two, disabled from a motorcycle accident a couple of years back, stuck in a wheelchair. Doesn’t get out much, but on December twenty-ninth a cousin took him grocery shopping in Rockport and to hit what was left of the after-Christmas sale at the pharmacy. They drove by Delaney’s, and Arnie swore he saw Conrad sitting in the sleigh with a mug in his hand. This was in the morning, about eight.”
“So Conrad sat in the sleigh for three days and no one stopped? No one noticed?” If that was true, Piper thought it very sad.
“Either they didn’t notice him or they just figured he was sitting out there for a brief time. Evidently the partiers across the street hadn’t paid any attention until Mrs. Hagee suggested her husband invite Conrad over. Really, a person only notices stuff when they pay attention.”
“And you talked to Arnie when?”
“I stopped this morning, after I chatted with Zachary Delaney, and right before we got the Thornbridge call. Zachary had mentioned he’d been at Arnie’s, and so I went to Arnie’s, too.”
“And you didn’t tell me this when I saw you at Miss Thornbridge’s because—”
He frowned, the scar showing a little more pronounced. “Because I was so wrapped up in the Thornbridge crime scene.” Randy took a step back from the table. “In the past ten years, we’ve had three murders. Now in the past few days, two.”
The comment Dr. Neufeld made about the bodies dropping back-to-back after Piper took office sprang to mind.
“So I just didn’t think about it then to be honest,” he continued. “Not then, but it was in my notes.”
“No worries.” Piper looked at the Christmas cards; from the side of the table she’d selected they were all upside down. “But good to know. One more thing they had in common. Killed the same day. Probably.” She rose and walked past the tables to a whiteboard she’d set up before driving to Evansville this morning. It was blank.
She made three headers:
Commonalities Conrad Delaney Abigail Thornbridge
She wrote under the Commonalities column:
Victims seniors, knew each other
Murdered December 28th or 29th
Strangled
Killer posed victims to match Christmas cards they’d sent
Pets unharmed/killer likes animals?
Killer drives a big maroon and/or gray pickup?
Piper returned to the Thornbridge Christmas card table.
“She got seventy-two cards,” Randy said. “Her address book has at least three times that many names in it.”
“She was a school teacher and principal for a ton of years, knew a lot of people,” Piper put in. “She probably sent out a lot of cards. Elderly, probably didn’t go out much, stayed home and wrote Christmas cards. Probably sent more cards than she received.”
“Yeah, haven’t had time yet to match names in these cards to her address book. Figure I’ll start that now. I found boxes of unused Christmas cards in a hall closet, like she was hoarding them, sale price stickers over the top of the original prices…cheap…like she bought them at after Christmas sales. Wrapping paper and ribbon, too, all with sale prices. Santa plates and napkins still in cellophane, sale prices. All of it, according to the stickers, from the big shop in Santa Claus. She had a closet full of half-price Christmas. Maybe enough to open her own store.” He pointed to Conrad’s table. “The card she sent him, that one there—”
Piper looked at it. She’d seen it hanging on the yarn line in Mr. Delaney’s den, had taken a picture of it. Mrs. Santa sat in a rocking chair directly in front of a Christmas tree that was loaded with ornaments and silvery tinsel and topped with an angel. She wore a long red dress and slippers and had a cup in her hands, a swirl of glitter rising from it. There was more glitter on the tree. Abigail had been posed closely to resemble it.
“Abigail must have liked that design,” Randy said. “There were two more unopened boxes of it, and one with a few cards left. Like I said, we don’t know how many cards she sent out.”
“Just need to find Conrad’s list of forty-five and cross-reference it with hers. Our suspect list is the names that match. She went back to the board and added:
Victims sent cards to the killer, knew him or her
“I think that’s a good bet, the way I’m leaning. But maybe the guy just saw the cards,” Randy said. “We have to account for that possibility, for every possibility. He might not actually have been on their card list.”
“The killer didn’t sell them the cards. Miss Thornbridge bought hers at a store in Santa Claus, Mr. Delaney ordered his online.” Piper underlined it.
Victims sent cards to the killer, knew him or her
“No, Randy, it’s not likely the guy—or the woman—simply saw the cards,” Piper said. “And it’s not a coincidence that the victims were posed to look like the cards. Conrad Delaney, Abigail Thornbridge, they sent their killer Christmas cards. They knew the killer, had done something to piss him or her off. And, yeah, I’ll concede that the killer is probably a man. Not many women could lift Conrad into that sleigh.” But she could have. Piper had carried a two hundred and forty pound man out of a burning building on one of her downrange assignments. Her shoulders let her know it was a bad idea, but as small as she was she’d managed it.
She went to the Delaney table and picked up the card that Sweet Abby T had sent Conrad, the one the old woman had been posed to eerily resemble. There were only a few differences between the card and the crime scene. Mrs. Santa was in a long red dress, while Abigail had been wearing a lengthy red flannel nightgown. Mrs. Santa had a cap, and Abigail did not. Mrs. Santa’s mug was green and white striped, Abigail’s was red…just like the one in Conrad’s hands, price sticker on the bottom, from the Santa Shop in Santa Claus. But Abigail was posed in the same manner as the Mrs. Santa image, head back, arms on the rocker, hands clasping the mug.
“One very sick S.O.B.” Piper let out a long breath and came back to the Abigail table, sat facing the cards this time, and resting her elbows on the edge. She gazed at the cards and realized Randy had arranged them by type of image, not size.
To her left were the “word” cards: Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays, Peace, Peace on Earth, Joyeux Noël, Feliz Navidad, Let it Snow Let it Snow, Joy to the World, and Jesus is the Reason for the Season. There were no images on these cards, just the words in card-covering big fancy script, some metallic, the Let it Snow Let it Snow card in a glittery white against a foil blue, likely one of the more expensive cards on display. Let it stop snowing, Piper thought.
Next, the religious-themed set: A trio of angels with trumpets, more than a dozen manger scenes, a little drummer boy, wise men under a star, and a variety of churches at night with snow spreading away. Some were large and beautiful on embossed cardstock. Others were about four inches square, flimsy, and looking like they came from one of those discount boxes you’d find at the Dollar Store.
There were four picture postcards, Conrad’s and the sleigh; a man and woman sitting in front of a fireplace with three dogs at their feet; a massive Christmas tree in front of some government building; and a Santa on a throne holding a baby, a toddler standing nearby, probably taken at some shopping mall. She intended to read every card, after she got a notebook out of her office, jot down names, any sentiments that didn’t sit right. To get so many cards…Abigail must have had a lot of friends.
And among them one enemy.
Finally came a collection of carolers, Santas, decked-out trees, snowmen, ice skaters, reindeer, poinsettias, wreaths, stockings in front of fireplaces—one with Santa’s boots hanging down like he was just sliding down to deliver presents—penguins in hats and scarves, and bright red birds sitting on snowy fence railings. There was a large one with a pug snoozing in a red blanket. Piper opened it to read the message: Hope you’ll be snug as a pug in a rug this Christmas. My love to you and Wrinkles, xoxoxo Betty B.
“Poor Wrinkles,” she said, thinking of Miss Thornbridge’s aged pug. “Maybe Oren can find someone to take him.”
“Probably,” Randy said. “He’s got a soft spot for animals.”
“So does the killer, apparently.”
“MP right? You were in the military police? My sister was in the Army, eight years, but she was stationed out of Fort Benning, Georgia. They trained her as a dental technician. She joined the Army to see the world, but they never sent her out of the South. All she saw was the inside of a lot of people’s mouths. She was gonna go for twenty, get that sweet military pension.” He paused. “But she met a guy, married him and moved to Ohio.”
Piper fixed her eyes on the picture of Conrad in the sleigh. “I joined to see the world, too. That and because I didn’t want to go to college.” Actually, she hadn’t known what she wanted to do with her life…other than get out of Spencer County. She sounded a bit li
ke Nang, listless until he got the lottery ticket. She’d seen a billboard with a woman in Army combat gear and thought, why not? Why not “be all she could be” as the saying went.
“Why the MP?”
Randy was nosy…no wonder he supposedly was a good detective, even though he’d missed Conrad’s county phonebook.
“The MP field’s wide open for women, a good choice, really. Because my dad was with this department for so long, brought the job home with him, I guess I was interested in law enforcement. So I told the recruiter to sign me up for the MP track.”
Randy’s pacing took him to the opposite side of the table. She looked up; he was studying her face. His expression asked her to continue.
“In boot camp I took OSUT, One Station Unit Training, as part of the MP division. My MOS was 31 Bravo. Became a crack shot. For whatever reason, I aced all my training, even won a few awards.”
“MOS?”
“Military Occupational Specialty. They made me part of the Third BCT…Brigade Combat Team. The Rakkasans.” A hint of pride crept into her voice, the words coming sweeter. “It’s a Japanese word. In World War II, when the 101st out of Fort Campbell deployed, the Japanese saw the parachutes and called them rakkasan, ‘umbrella men.’ It’s a very storied unit.”
“So did you jump?”
“Parachutes?” She shivered at the memory. Why should I jump out of a perfectly good plane? she’d asked her instructor just before he gave her a push. “Yeah, I jumped and jumped and jumped.”
“Cool.”
“I didn’t stay at Fort Campbell long. And when I was there, I was in a cruiser, watching for speeders, traffic violations, some ER calls on the base. Then I got deployed.”
“Where?” Randy seemed genuinely interested. She figured he hadn’t read any of the newspaper articles about her during the campaign.
