March's Luck (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 5)

by A. E. Howe

  I left Shantel still mumbling about not getting good help.

  Darlene called at three o’clock.

  “You missed out on a fun one,” she told me. “Darzi figures Hank was in there almost the whole time he was missing.” Not a surprise. “He probably died from exposure after passing out from whatever drugs were in his system. There were no wounds or internal damage to the body, so Darzi figures that Hank did crawl into the pipe on his own. He’s ordered the toxicology lab to do a wide spectrum analysis on the blood and organ samples, which he made a point of saying is very expensive. We’ll know more when the report comes back.”

  “Thanks for taking one for the team,” I said in the spirit of comradery. I filled her in on what Shantel had told me. “Did you ask him when Marshall’s could pick up the body?”

  “Anytime from this afternoon on,” Darlene said.

  “I’ll call the family.”

  I spent most of the afternoon on the phone. First I called Marge, who was relieved that they could move forward with the funeral preparations. I asked her to let me know when the viewing and the funeral would be. Next I briefed Lt. Johnson, my immediate supervisor, on the status of the investigation. Johnson had been in the military for twenty years and had a soldier’s aversion to politics. He seemed to count his lucky stars when the sheriff stepped in on high profile cases such as these, but he and I still pretended that he was in charge.

  I started to call Dad, then figured that I might as well walk the hundred feet to his office. He was on the phone, but he nodded for me to sit down. He was making small talk and, after a couple of minutes, it was obvious to me that he was reaching out to one of his political supporters. I checked to make sure that he was on his personal phone. Dad was meticulous about separating political activities from his official duties, but it wasn’t like he could confine them to particular hours of the day. He just tried to make sure that he didn’t use county resources.

  He finally hung up after ten minutes, looking frustrated. “Do you know how much I’m going to have to spend on this election?” he asked me.

  “Fifty thousand?” I tossed out.

  “Maybe close to that. If Maxwell hadn’t gotten into the race…” He let the sentence drift off.

  I gave Dad all of the current details on the investigation. He leaned back and listened intently. With most people, if they lean forward it’s a sign that they are engaged and paying attention. But I’d learned as a kid that when Dad really wanted to concentrate on what you were saying, he’d lean back and half close his eyes. I figured out that he was trying to let his mind hear the words rather than let his eyes focus on things that would distract him from what you were saying. However, if he was trying to gauge a person’s honesty, then he’d aim both headlights right into their eyes.

  When I finished, he leaned forward. “What a pile of crazy. What’s your next move? And remember that waiting for lab reports is not taking action.”

  “Darlene and I are going to shadow our suspects as well as we can by ourselves.”

  “Take some extra deputies if you need them. I’ll authorize the overtime,” he said, then added, “within limits.”

  “We’ll conduct searches on our gold diggers. If they don’t give us permission, we shouldn’t have too much trouble coming up with probable cause. And we’ll try to get the remaining family members to give us permission to conduct searches of their premises. We’re already searching Joe’s house again and the area around it for anything that might have been used as the primary weapon. And we’ll conduct interviews with anyone that might have information about our gold hunters or the family.”

  Dad seemed satisfied with our planned approach. “You have to hate cases where you have too many suspects, but not one that’s really good,” he grumbled.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On Friday I got a call from Marge that the viewing was going to be held Saturday evening and that the triple funeral would be on Sunday afternoon. Sunday was an unusual day for a funeral—Saturdays or weekdays were the norm—but this was an unusual situation.

  “I’m just doing the best I can,” Marge said at one point in the conversation. I wondered how much help Jane and Andrew were being. Not much, I guessed.

  Darlene and I went down one rabbit hole after another following leads. All of them petered out in the end. I hated to admit it, and I’d never tell Dad, but the truth was we were just waiting for the lab reports and hoping to fall onto a promising lead. We did keep tabs on our seven prime suspects. I let Darlene in on the fact that Eddie was my informant and had proved useful in the past. She just gave me a skeptical look.

  We decided we would both attend the viewing and the funeral. We wanted to keep an eye out in case someone showed up we hadn’t accounted for. We couldn’t close the door on the possibility that someone we hadn’t even considered was our killer. And we also wanted to watch our current batch of suspects closely. If one of them showed up and was acting strangely, we wanted to be there. Funerals were often an opportunity to see suspects interacting in an emotionally charged atmosphere.

  Shantel took her intern out to Joe’s house. They collected half a dozen objects that could have been the primary murder weapon, including a surprisingly clean golf club found in a gardening shed.

  At three o’clock, Shantel finally got a report back from the lab. The skin found on the concrete alligator had come back as a match for Hank Junior. I called Darlene, who was at the main farm with Deputy Martel, searching vehicles and outbuildings for possible weapons.

  “Interesting and very suggestive. But not enough to be conclusive,” Darlene said over the phone.

  “In fact, it could be counterproductive. If we arrest someone else for the murder, a defense attorney is going to propose that Hank killed Joe and then committed suicide by drug overdose,” I said.

  “Happy thought,” she said morosely.

  By the end of the day, between the search of Joe’s house and farm, we had dozens of items for our crime scene techs to check for trace evidence. Darlene and Martel had been very selective. On such a large farm, there were literally thousands of tools that could have fit the descriptions that Dr. Darzi and the blood splatter expert gave us. Darlene chose to take only the most suggestive—ones that looked too clean or seemed to have been hidden.

  We still needed to search Marge’s, Clive’s, Jane’s and Andrew’s vehicles, but we didn’t have probable cause, which meant that they could just refuse to let us. I decided to wait until after the funeral to approach them, hoping they might be in a more receptive, less emotional state of mind.

  Saturday dawned as a gorgeous spring day. The sun was a little warmer and the trees were beginning to show some of their bright green foliage. I got up, dressed, fed Ivy and headed for the Springtime in the Square celebration.

  The festival activities took place in the town square around the courthouse, with all of the local churches and charities participating. When I got there at nine, everyone was setting up their booths. Dad had a small one where he and a couple of friends handed out election brochures, while Mauser drew the usual adoring crowd. But Chief Maxwell had his family, including a couple of impossibly cute grandchildren, passing out candy and bumper stickers at another booth on the other side of the square. Dad was going to have his work cut out for him this election.

  I found the animal adoption booth sandwiched between the First Baptist Church and the Red Cross booths. I helped Cara and a few other volunteers carry and set up dog crates and cat cages before taking the leash of a rather hyper puppy that looked to be a mix of Dachshund and German Shepard. He was equal parts ugly and adorable.

  The day spent in the sunshine helping Cara and the humane society would have been perfect if almost everyone who stopped by hadn’t kept trying to ferret out information on the Parrish killings. The fact that I had the viewing that evening also prevented me from banishing the murders to the back of my mind. At least I scored brownie points with Cara for helping out.

  Afte
r lending a hand with the teardown, I headed home to get a shower and dressed for the viewing. Digging in my closet, I hauled out my funeral clothes—a black jacket, pants and tie. I debated my gun and badge options before deciding on the more discreet shoulder holster and placing my badge in my inside coat pocket rather than hanging it on my belt. Emotions run high at funerals, but I didn’t really expect to have to arrest anyone.

  Cara had offered to come with me, but she hadn’t known any of the Parrishes and I’d be stuck there from beginning to end. Besides, I needed to keep my eyes on everyone coming and going.

  Marshall’s Funeral Home was made up of two main buildings. The original building was a large Victorian house built in the late 1890s. John Marshall was the first mortician in the family and he had bought the house in 1934. He’d been a carpenter who kept his money in a mattress instead of a bank, so when the Great Depression hit he left with cash. He’d bought the house for pennies on the dollar when it was about to go into foreclosure. George had decided that death would be a better business than construction. Eighty-plus years later, his great-grandson was running the operation and, by all accounts, making a healthy profit.

  In 1994 they had built a large brick building that housed a chapel and an impressive casket showroom. As small as Adams County was, there were people all over north Florida who had roots there and had plans to come back when they were ready to spend eternity underground or in a bronze urn.

  The viewing was scheduled for the chapel since none of the rooms in the original house came close to accommodating the expected number of mourners and gawkers. The chapel had been designed so that there could be two services with a divider between them, or one large service. Tonight they were going to need all the room they could get.

  I arrived half an hour before the viewing was scheduled to start. It was supposed to run between seven and nine. Marge, Clive, Jane and Andrew were already there. The three coffins sat atop draped biers next to a podium at the front of the chapel. Hank Senior’s was in the middle. His was open while the two coffins on either side were tastefully closed with pictures of the sons on stands next to them.

  Marge and Jane were positioning the hundreds of flower arrangements around the room. It looked like they were playing some bizarre game, as one would move a flower arrangement to one location and then the other woman would eventually come by and move it somewhere else. Neither seemed to notice that the other one was undoing her work. Clive and Andrew just stood apart from the women and each other, looking awkward and uncomfortable.

  Everyone in the family looked up when I came in and then immediately ignored me, which was fine. I stood at the back of the room, trying to fade into the woodwork.

  Darlene arrived and we decided that she would station herself outside in her car, keeping an eye out for anything odd going on outside. Who knew? Maybe the murderer would come to the viewing, but not be able to bring himself to enter the chapel. Yeah, we were grasping at straws.

  By seven there was already a large crowd of people. I watched as old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while shook hands and talked about the triple tragedy before moving on to discuss whatever was going on in their lives. Viewings are very much a social event in the south. They are about showing respect for the deceased and showing everyone else that you are showing respect for the deceased.

  Most everyone paid their respects to Hank Senior first, before finding whichever Parrish family members they knew best and telling them how sorry they were for their losses. They took another few minutes to talk to anyone else they knew before quietly leaving.

  Pete and his wife, Sarah, came in about eight.

  “I hate funerals,” Pete said to me as his wife went up to talk with Marge. Pete looked uncomfortable crammed into a dark suit two sizes too small.

  “Wearing uncomfortable clothes at an uncomfortable social event where half the people are on an emotional cliff. What’s not to like?” I asked sarcastically.

  “At least you’re being paid to be here,” he tossed back.

  “True. But I also have the added pressure of trying to come up with something useful out of all of this.” I waved at the crowd.

  “Your murderer is probably here,” Pete acknowledged. “But they aren’t liable to confess in front of everyone.”

  “I know. Just crossing t’s and dotting i’s,” I said.

  “Cara called me about taking her to the range.”

  “Really?” Even though she’d said she was going to do it, I was surprised that she had. Apparently she was really serious about becoming more proficient with a handgun.

  “I think having your insane ex-girlfriend in town has made her nervous.”

  “Ha, me too,” I said. “Hopefully we can clear up these murders and Marcy’ll leave town again.”

  “What the hell is all this about her hunting for Nazi gold?” Pete asked.

  I explained all the idiocy surrounding the treasure hunt to Pete’s great amusement.

  “You sure do lead an interesting life. All I have going is a bar fight that landed two guys in the hospital and a bar full of folks who didn’t see anything. And a domestic dispute that turned into a Mike Tyson fight. The husband lost most of his ear while the wife suffered a serious concussion. You getting along better with Darl?” he asked.

  “I think so. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get to where I like her better than you.”

  “Hey, now. We have a beautiful bromance going on.”

  I tried to keep an eye on the crowd as we bantered back and forth until Sarah came back over and she and Pete were able to make their escape.

  After they left, I looked at my watch to see that I had more than half an hour before I could even hope that the viewing would begin to wind down.

  Dad came in toward the end to pay his respects. He was wearing his dress uniform with a black armband. When Marge saw him, she went straight over and they talked for a few minutes.

  After he went up to the coffins and stood for a moment, he came back to me. “What did Marge want to talk to you about?” I asked.

  “Hank served in Vietnam. I’d told her I’d arrange an honor guard. She was just checking on that. The National Guard is sending a detail.”

  “I’m sure she appreciates your help.”

  “I’m sure she’d appreciate knowing who’s killing her family,” he said abruptly and then added, “I don’t mean to give you hard time. This isn’t an easy case.”

  Dad hung around for a few more minutes, talking with folks. I knew that he hated to feel as if he was taking advantage of a situation to play politics, but in a situation like this there was a very thin line between duty, loyalty to a friend and plain old country politics.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  At last my watch said it was nine o’clock so I texted Darlene and told her that she could head home. The last of the mourners came and went. Jane was standing by the caskets, talking with Andrew, while Marge straightened things that didn’t need straightening. I stayed at the back of the chapel next to the double oak doors as Fredrick Marshall, the current patriarch of the Marshall clan, went around locking some of the doors and turning off all but the main lights. Then he walked over to Marge, talked to her for just a moment and then went to close Hank Senior’s casket. But at that moment the door beside me opened and Joel Patrick walked in.

  Joel was dressed in an old black coat and pants that probably would have been rejected by Goodwill. I was so surprised at his appearance that I allowed him to get halfway down the aisle before jogging up to intercept him.

  I saw motion by the caskets. Jane had pushed past Andrew and was also heading to intercept Joel, who was strolling toward the three coffins as though there was no one else in the room.

  “Jane,” Joel said in a sad voice, but loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. Jane was standing right in front of him now.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, trying to whisper but failing completely. The rest of the room had gone silent and they were the foc
us of everyone’s attention.

  “Paying my respects, of course,” he said and tried to walk around her. As I was coming up behind him, I saw Mr. Marshall move in front of the caskets. Everyone in the room, including Clive, Marge and Andrew, moved toward Joel as if we were all pins being drawn to a magnet.

  Apparently realizing that he couldn’t get through everyone, he turned back to Jane. “I’m sorry for your father’s passing. He and I had our differences, but… And Hank Junior, he was a good kid. I liked him. Worked with Joe all those years ago. Those months in the hay fields were the best time of my youth.” Joel was rambling. Jane was speechless and everyone else seemed unsure what to do.

  “I’m sure that you mean well by coming here, but the viewing is over,” I said, coming up behind him. He hadn’t seen me when he came in and now he swung around and gave me a cold look that quickly turned back into fake grief.

  “I just want a second,” he said.

  “That is up to the family,” I said firmly.

  Joel, his eyes wide and innocent, looked from Jane to Marge. “Really, I just…”

  He didn’t get any further then that. The door of the chapel was slammed open again with a bang, causing all of us to turn and look. Strolling up the aisle like an avenging angel on crack was Marcy, aiming a pump shotgun at all of us.

  Two instincts warred inside of me. First was the need to protect, to step between Marcy and the others. The second instinct was the more rational one that screamed at me to jump behind the nearest pew because that woman was crazy. The first one, backed by years of training, won out.

  “Marcy, put down the gun,” I said calmly and firmly, while keeping both of my hands down by my sides. I stood between her and everyone else, but didn’t move toward her.