The Dead of Winter (A Piper Blackwell Mystery Book 1)

by Jean Rabe

  Randy was in the trunk. Handcuffed, strangled.

  P-e-t-e-c-h-i-a-l, Piper thought. She felt punched in the gut. Her detective, the man who’d fussed over her the night she’d been run off the road, stared blankly up at her, his legs curled around his evidence kit. Why had Randy been so stupid to let this happen?

  How many times since she’d started work as Sheriff of Spencer County had it been difficult for her to breathe?

  “He was a good guy,” Oren said softly.

  But he’d been a foolish one.

  The rest was a blur, radioing Drew and the Owensboro police and coroner.

  “Stay here,” Piper told Oren. “I’m going to that rent-by-the-week.” She had the address, one of the two Drew had sent.

  “You need backup,” Oren said.

  “He won’t be there,” Piper returned. “But I bet that’s where Randy found him.”

  She took off at a run, reaching to her side and feeling the grip of her gun…just in case she was wrong and Zachary was home.

  The manager remembered Randy from last night and took Piper to Zachary’s room.

  “He cleared out early early early this morning. Woke me up with all the racket he was making. I saw him throw his clothes in the trunk so I threw on my coat and came out to see what was going on. Told me things with his dad hadn’t worked out as planned and so he had to move on, but that he was going to the funeral first. I told him no refund on the rent he’d paid. He was paid up until the end of the month, paid me with a stack of tens and twenties.” The manager nodded repeatedly like one of those drinking birds on a tavern windowsill. “Told your deputy that last night, about the tens and twenties. Zach, he told me I can have whatever he left in the room. He wasn’t a bad sort, Zach. Not really. A quiet renter most of the time. What kind of trouble did he get himself into?”

  Piper didn’t reply, just opened the drapes so light could stream in. It was an old, worn place, not quite a dump, but close enough to it in her opinion. It smelled fusty. The bedspread was SpongeBob SquarePants, the pillowcase had Spiderman and Captain America on it, making it look more like a child’s room than an adult’s. Again she mentally pummeled herself; she should have talked to Zachary a few days ago rather than going to Conrad’s autopsy. Piper thought she’d made the right call at the time…but she missed the autopsy because the coroner started early, and she missed gleaning something from the Zachary sit-down that maybe Randy had picked up on. She’d been on the job then less than forty-eight hours at that time, was in over her head and had made the wrong call. But kicking herself in the brain now wouldn’t accomplish anything. And her having interviewed Zach would not have saved the Christmas corpses…though it might have saved Randy.

  Don’t beat yourself up about this. Soldier on. Learn from it.

  She saw the little ceramic tree on the desk.

  “He said I can have whatever’s here,” the manager repeated. “That little tree, I can have that.” The manager had left the door open and was standing in the threshold. The cold air flowed in. She heard sirens.

  Piper saw the stack of Christmas cards. “Not the cards,” she told him. In her haste she hadn’t brought an evidence bag, so she kept her gloves on. “You don’t get those.” She didn’t give a shit about anything else…it was the cards.

  “I’m thinking about what he might have in the refrigerator. Don’t want it to go to waste, you understand. That’d be sinful. He usually had some beer.”

  Piper opened drawers, finding them empty, the closet empty save for an oversized bag from the store in Santa Claus, and at the bottom of it a box containing three red Merry Christmas mugs.

  Eleven mugs, he’d bought.

  Five victims so far.

  Three mugs not used, so eight accounted for.

  That equaled potentially three more murder victims.

  Piper growled.

  “The food, can I take that now?”

  “Wait,” she told him. “And don’t come in here.” Her cell phone chirped. Oren. “What? Sure, get over here, apartment 2A, the door’s open. Need a couple of evidence bags and your kit. Radio JJ, I want her down here, lights and sirens so she makes good time. Put someone in the car with her. I don’t care who. I want two of our guys here.”

  Piper went back to the cards and spread them out, not as deftly as she would have without the winter gloves. One from Conrad. She flipped it over, saw it was signed Dad. No message. One from Abigail Thornbridge. She nudged it open; signed Abby T. One from Jacob Wallem, again nothing inside but a signature, Jake. Same with the triple snowman card from Samuel Reynolds, Sammy.

  “There!” She found a cartoon card just like the one the homeless man had sent to Wallem, Santa tangled in reindeer antlers. Inside, the signature Tommy.

  Twenty cards, ten of them signatures only. These she separated.

  “Excuse me. Gotta get in here.” Oren had made good time, but he’d only been a block away. She suspected he’d been pulling in the parking lot when he’d called her. He pressed past the manager. “Owensboro coroner showed up with the cops. Fast. Seems they’d been listening to the BOLOs.”

  “Here,” Piper said. “This is Zach’s kill list.”

  “Christmas cards.”

  “He killed the people who didn’t write him a note inside the cards they’d sent him. That’s how the sick son of a bitch picked his victims. Here and here and here and here, and the homeless man. The homeless guy, Olbert, he sent Zach a card, too. And these other five cards, signatures only…I’ll wager three of the senders are dead, because that’s how many goddamn red Merry Christmas mugs are not accounted for.” She waved a hand behind her to indicate the bag with the mugs in them. She’d brought it out of the closet and set it on SpongeBob’s face.

  “So Randy came here hoping to catch him, and—” Oren said.

  “—somehow got caught instead. That’s not a smart detective.” Piper stepped back from the desk and tugged off her gloves, pulled out her cell phone and called up the menu; it was easier to operate with her bare fingers. “Drew. Anybody in there with you? Marsh? Put him on.” She paused and watched Oren pull out two evidence bags, one for the cards with only a signature, one for the more thoughtful and breathing people who had written notes.

  As she talked to Drew, she stepped in the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet. All it contained were two empty prescription bottles, one for Prozac, the other for Clozardil. “Awesome,” she said softly, recognizing the latter medicine. A civilian employee at Fort Campbell always carried it in her purse, told Piper Clozardil was for her bipolar problem. “Maybe Zach has been off his meds a while.”

  She came back into the other room, still talking to Drew.

  “While you have him on the phone,” Oren cut in, “tell him to have everyone switch channels on their radios. The radio’s missing out of Randy’s car. I bet Zach’s been listening to us, knows exactly where we are.”

  “And two is four,” Piper hissed.

  Thirty-Two

  Piper took the Audubon Parkway west out of Owensboro. The GPS told her it would take thirty-four minutes, but she’d make it in far less. The lights flashed, no siren, and she topped the speed limit by twenty. There was no ice on the road, and the snow on either side was light, as if the blizzard of a few nights past had stopped at the Kentucky line.

  She was driving Oren’s Explorer, and had thought about leaving him at the rent-by-the-week; he could have caught a ride back with JJ, who’d radioed she was on her way. But Oren had pressed her.

  “Randy went after this guy alone, Sheriff Blackwell, and look where that got him,” he’d said. “You need backup. Zach’s damn dangerous.”

  Piper had acquiesced, not because of what Oren said, but because of the look in his eyes. They gleamed. She suspected her chief deputy didn’t give a damn about her safety or being backup—maybe wouldn’t mind if she was killed so he could take her job—he was just hungry to catch this guy. Likely the biggest case in his forty-year career, and he didn’t want to b
e left behind. So she decided not to leave him behind. She just wished they liked each other a little; his company would be more tolerable.

  “I’m driving,” she’d told him.

  He didn’t argue, and he didn’t talk during the short trip. The radio chatter, on another channel, was all about Randy Gerald, the rent-by-the-week efficiency, and the serial killer that had plagued Spencer County, Indiana.

  She took a right onto Main when they reached the downtown, passing a resale clothing store, buildings for lease, and a shoe store with a SALE sign in the window. Henderson, with more population than all of her county, didn’t have much more of a business district than Rockport. Most of the retailers were out on the strip by the bridge. Some historians claimed that prior to WWI Henderson had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. Tobacco had been the reason, with warehouses and farms that closed when high tariffs were imposed after the war. The little city’s economic boom reversed.

  Piper had been through the town many times, as a child with her father attending the annual bluegrass festival, which was still one of the largest in the country, and then later when she went to Fort Campbell for basic training; the base was a straight shot down from Henderson.

  She’d never been to the police station, but she knew where it was on Barrett. She parked in the side lot and headed in, Oren, still quiet, behind her.

  Detective Ira Dammann was short, about Piper’s height, but was likely twice her age and had fifty pounds on her, her shirt straining at the buttons as evidence. She had close-cropped stark white hair, bright green eyes, and a nose that seemed a little too small for her face. Her smile was engaging and her handshake strong and dry. Piper had called the Henderson Police Department on the way and fate was generous, Ira was in. She agreed to wait for them.

  “It’s open, that’s for sure,” Ira said of the case. She had a deep southern accent, hinting that she had roots a good way southeast of Henderson. “No suspects. Thomas Olbert had been homeless, though he was staying at the shelter at the time of his death. No relatives in the area, a sister in Indianapolis who claimed the body and had him cremated, his mother deceased. The sister said the father took off on the family when they were kids; she had no clue where he was, neither did she care.” Ira paused. “But the sister cared about Thomas, said she had tried to get him to move to Indianapolis, to stay with her and her husband and get him into rehab.”

  “But he wouldn’t,” Piper surmised.

  “No. It might have saved him. In more ways than one.” Ira nudged the coroner’s report across the table. They sat in what passed for the department’s cafeteria, coffee in the middle of the table, steaming cups in front of them. Oren was drinking his. Piper was too preoccupied.

  “Death by strangulation,” Piper said, reading the cause. “Blunt force trauma to the head first. The impaling was done post-mortem.”

  “Probably wacked him because he put up a fight,” Ira suggested. “Strangled him when he was down.”

  “Late stage cirrhosis of the liver,” Piper continued.

  “Coroner said he was obviously a heavy drinker, or had been. The shelter said he was going to AA but kept tripping up. Cirrhosis would have got him before summer, most likely, but someone sped up his demise. Sad end for someone so young.” Ira sat back from the table and gave Piper the up and down. “Heard about your election, Ms. Blackwell. Quite the news item.”

  Piper kept reading the reports Ira provided. Oren looked over her shoulder.

  “Do you have any files on Zachary Delaney? He used to live here, said he had some drug problems while he was here, and—”

  “Got those files coming for you,” Ira interrupted. “Saw it on the wire, you figuring him the doer in the Spencer County murders. So I had the files pulled. You’re thinking he did Olbert, too?”

  “There was a red Merry Christmas mug with the body, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah, we’re thinking he killed Thomas Olbert, too.”

  “The files, they don’t leave the room, Sheriff.” Ira stood. “I’ll be at my desk, you need anything. Stop by on your way out.”

  As if on cue a woman in a khaki suit walked in with a thick manila folder. Her name badge read Sgt. Angie Muller. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, face sharp angles and planes and expression hard-looking. “Ira says you want this. It can’t leave the room. Let me know if you need copies of anything.”

  “Thanks,” Piper said. “Angie…do you remember dealing with Zachary Delaney?”

  She gave a nod. “Was listening to the stuff on the scanner out of Owensboro and it piqued my interest that you’re looking for him. Zachary? I remember him. He used to live around Henderson a few years back. Zach had some run-ins here. A lot of run-ins, actually. I arrested him three or four times. Drugs mostly, nothing major, annoyances really, some noise complaints, parking tickets. A lot, but nothing really awful. He didn’t do time for any of it. I read his file over again just before you came. Looks like he was a troubled kid, wrong kind of friends, couldn’t quite find his way.”

  “Maybe he found his way to a very dark place,” Piper told the woman. She passed Oren half the papers in the file, and they started reading. A dozen pages in, she stopped and used her cell to call JJ and then Drew…they reported no sightings of either Zachary Delaney or the blue car.

  “The monk’s here in the office, Sheriff,” Drew said. He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s cross-legged on the floor, meditating or something. Hasn’t a clue where his brother would run to. He seems real shook up about all of this, and swears Zach wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “I don’t think Anthony knows his brother anymore,” Piper said more to herself. “He’s been away too many years.”

  Several minutes later, Piper pushed her part of the file away. “The addresses are all over the place, Oren. Apartments. No list of friends or associates. And two is four.”

  “And four is eight,” Oren said. “I might have something.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a narrow notebook. Piper saw it didn’t have many blank pages in it. He flipped to the front and started paging through. She caught names printed and underlined: Chris Hagee, Joan Hagee…must have been from the scene of Conrad’s murder, when he talked to the people at the party. After several pages, he stopped. Zachary Delaney was underlined. He ran his thick finger down his notes, which were mostly illegible to her, a sort of shorthand scrawl. He’d typed them up, into the computer, and Piper had read through them, but she didn’t recall everything. Too many names, too few days to take it all in, too many murder victims. Five days on the job, and she felt as worn out as if she was going through the rigors of basic training again.

  “Here,” he said. “I got it pretty much word for word. Wrote it down after Zachary left. He used to deliver The Gleaner on rural routes. That’s the little Henderson paper, a daily.”

  “I know what The Gleaner is.”

  “He drove a black Civic he called the Batmobile and bought a trailer at a small park in the sticks. He probably meant somewhere in this county. Henderson’s bigger than Rockport, but there are lots of rural places. Some folks still make moonshine around here and call clumps of houses ‘hollers.’”

  Piper pulled out her phone again, got up and went to a table that held a cardboard box full of Christmas decorations that had been taken down. Near it were stacks of Styrofoam cups, sugar packets, and napkins—and a phonebook. She leafed to the yellow pages, then punched in a number, made a request, got pushy and was connected to someone at The Gleaner who managed employee records. She repeated her request and tapped her foot, walked back to the open file, then started pacing.

  A moment later, she whirled and pointed to Oren’s notebook, rattled off an address and repeated it. Oren wrote it on a blank page.

  “The only recorded address they had for Zachary Delaney. It’s a trailer park, but the secretary said she doesn’t think it exists anymore, some subdivision went in
somewhere nearby.”

  Oren looked at the address. “Some good fishing back in there, lots of creeks, a few big ponds. There’s a road that runs between Graham Hill and Zion, dinkburgs you’d call them. That’s probably where your trailer park used to be. But if it ain’t there anymore I don’t see—” He slapped his hand on the table and the pages fluttered. “Maybe it is still there.”

  “What?”

  Oren whistled. “Something I didn’t write down, but remember. Zach said he had a live-in girlfriend that was a bad influence on him. They called it quits and he gave her the trailer. ‘I go back and check on her every once in a while…to see if she’s still there,’ he said. I suppose it’s worth a looksee, Sheriff Blackwell.”

  “We’ve got nothing else,” Piper said. But she tried Drew and JJ one more time to make sure. “You’re driving this time. You seem familiar with the area.”

  “That was years ago, the fishing,” Oren said softly. “Decades. Me and Annie and Conrad, when he turned sixteen and could drive and wasn’t worried about gas money. Wild geese are prime for chasing in the winter in the sticks, Sheriff Blackwell.”

  Piper started to like Oren…but just a little bit.

  Thirty-Three

  The sky was the color of cold ashes, like one big cloud had settled in a dome over Henderson County, but it hinted at rain rather than snow, the temperature above freezing.

  Piper looked at her watch: 4 p.m. She’d been up twelve hours, but it felt like days because of the scant sleep she’d grabbed at the hospital. Still aching from her accident, she wished she would have grabbed a bottle of aspirin out of her desk drawer and chugged a few. At least, she thought, she was in too much pain to drift off. It gave her an edge and kept her alert.

  “Gonna be dark soon,” Oren observed, as he pulled the Explorer to the side of the county road. They’d already made one pass by the overgrown drive and had come around from the other direction. “According to your address, it’ll be back in there and up on that little hill. Can’t be anywhere else, past the ditch and through the trees. Don’t want to pull up into the drive in case he’s there. Don’t want to spook him. And I don’t think he’ll be able to see my Ford here because of the trees.”