Southern Pecan Killer

by Summer Prescott

  “Negative,” Tim frowned.

  “Maybe she wore gloves? Or washed her hands?”

  “Washing her hands wouldn’t help, and she’d have more residue on her than where gloves would cover. I don’t see any traces of residue anywhere.”

  “So now we’re back to someone killing both of them.”

  “It would appear so,” Tim pursed his lips and continued his examination of William. “You don’t have to stay late if you have other commitments, but after I do the prelim on him, I’m going back to the woman.”

  “I don’t think my extensive social calendar is booked for tonight. Besides, you’re my ride home,” she teased. “Why are you going back to her before we do the major stuff?”

  “I have a hypothesis.”

  “I love it when that happens,” her eyes brightened.

  **

  Fiona McCamish had a strong stomach, but when she saw how closely her boss was examining the remains of Dora Lyndhurst, she went a bit green around the gills.

  “Is it really necessary to get that close with the magnifying glass?” she asked, looking away while holding a clamp in place.

  “Is it really necessary for you to ask inane questions incessantly?” Tim drawled, his gaze never leaving what was left of Dora’s face. “There! There it is!” he exclaimed, getting as animated as was possible for the laid-back mortician.

  “What?” Fiona tamped down her squeamishness and tried to peer at what Tim had discovered.

  He had her take a quick picture for location purposes, then extracted the item that he’d found with tweezers.

  “What is it?” Fiona squinted as he held it up.

  Tim brought the fiber up to the magnifying glass so that his assistant could look through it.

  “Well, that looks just like…a feather. A blood soaked feather,” she murmured, gazing through the glass.

  “Precisely. I would imagine that the forensics team from the police department has found remnants of feathers as well,” Tim nodded, pleased that his hypothesis had been correct.

  “What does it mean?” Fiona frowned, her mind conjuring up some very strange circumstances involving voodoo and birds.

  Tim looked at her as though he was disappointed that she hadn’t put two and two together. She was accustomed to that look, so it didn’t bother her in the least.

  “If you look in the open police file, none of the neighbors heard a thing, even though, according to the time of death that we’ve established, the murders took place in the early morning,” he said, as though that explained it all.

  “Okay…” she prompted, wishing he’d just continue.

  “A pillow,” Tim blinked at her as though she were a complete dolt.

  “A pillow,” she repeated with a blank look.

  “The murderer used a pillow as a silencer,” he sighed, hating to have to spell it out and not grasping that she couldn’t read his mind.

  “No way! I thought that was just a thing that they did in movies. People really do that? It actually works?” Fiona’s mouth dropped open in surprise.

  “No, not well enough so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear, typically. Our killer may have used both a traditional silencer as well as a pillow.”

  “…and there was no silencer on the gun at the scene. So you were right, as usual,” Fiona nodded appreciatively. “The whole thing was staged.”

  “Text Chas Beckett and let him know that he should be on the lookout for a ruined pillow and perhaps a traditional silencer as well,” Tim directed, turning back to Dora’s body.

  “Fun, I haven’t had to contact Detective Tall, Dark and Handsome in quite a while. Shouldn’t we maybe tell him first that Dora didn’t do the killing?”

  “He knows.”

  “How does he know?” Fiona was puzzled.

  Tim gave her a most patronizing look, and simply repeated himself. “He knows.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  “Feel like a little dumpster diving?” Chas asked Spencer, after he received Fiona’s text.

  “I have a change of clothes in my office. Why, what’s up?” Spencer raised an eyebrow, intrigued.

  Chas filled him in on Tim’s preliminary reports, and the young man nodded.

  “I gotcha. So you want to me to go on a pillow hunt.”

  “And a silencer, for that matter,” Chas added.

  “Mr. Beckett,” Holly, the receptionist peeked around the door frame into Chas’s office. “I hate to interrupt, but you asked me to let you know if I found out where Rosemary Conrad dropped off her hand-me-downs the morning after her daughter’s death.”

  “You found the clothing?” Chas was impressed.

  “Yes, sir. There’s a thrift store just a few blocks from Ms. Conrad’s office. I spoke to the intake coordinator there and he said that he remembered a very, ahem…” she cut off abruptly, blushing.

  “Go on,” Chas encouraged, puzzled.

  Holly looked very uncomfortable but nodded. “Okay, but, these are the coordinator’s words not mine. He said that a very “swishy” young man, who was dressed in thousands of dollars’ worth of designer clothes, asked for a receipt for his donation to be made out for his boss, an R. Conrad. I remembered you describing Ms. Conrad’s assistant as “quite a character,” so I figured that maybe it was him. The coordinator said that the clothing was all still in bags because they haven’t had time to process them yet.” Holly bit her lip.

  The upstanding young woman made it a point to never say anything bad about anyone, although she did suggest that Ringo be required to shower as a condition of his employment.

  “Great work, Holly,” Chas nodded. The receptionist colored and beamed. “Will you run down to the thrift store and purchase all of the bags of clothing? Just put the charge on the company card.”

  “Of course, Mr. Beckett,” she smiled and ducked out of the room, feeling like an investigator.

  “That was a lucky break,” Spencer commented, when the young woman left the room.

  “Hopefully there’ll be some evidence in those bags, but in the meantime, we still need to hunt for a pillow. My car in ten minutes?” Chas consulted his watch.

  “I’ll be there in five,” Spencer rose and headed toward his office.

  **

  “Classy neighborhood, even the trash cans are decorative,” Spencer observed.

  Chas had parked several blocks away, and the two men, dressed in athletic wear, looked as though they were merely taking a leisurely afternoon stroll. They approached Rosemary Conrad’s house from a well-groomed right-of-way that ran next to the side of the house, having consulted a sanitation map before setting out.

  “The sanitation workers get fined if they leave any scraps behind. The homeowner’s association in this neighborhood is pretty strict,” Chas replied.

  “Well, hopefully we find what we’re looking for without having to dig too deeply,” Spencer grimaced.

  Fortunately, the trash barrels were of standard residential size, rather than full dumpster size, so they might have to dump them out, but they wouldn’t have to climb inside.

  “We’re too late,” Chas sighed, flipping open the first cover. “Trash has already been collected. The sanitation service said that it would be later this afternoon. They must have been ahead of schedule.”

  “I doubt it,” Spencer shook his head.

  When Chas gave him a questioning look, he continued.

  “I had to be part of a sanitation team once, as part of an undercover assignment, and I can tell you, even the best of teams never run ahead of schedule. They’re sometimes on time, but more often than not, they’re late, and usually it’s because they’re polite.”

  “Polite? What do you mean?” Chas frowned.

  “I mean that when they see a mom in a bathrobe, with a baby in one arm and a trash bag in the other running toward them, they stop and help her out,” Spencer explained.

  “Ah, makes sense. So you’re thinking that the homeowners might have dispose
d of the trash themselves this week?”

  Spencer nodded. “I’d say so. Especially after seeing this,” he gestured to the inside of the bin that he was peering into.

  Chas moved toward him to look, and followed the beam of Spencer’s flashlight, which illuminated the dark interior of the bin, even though it was still light outside.

  “You see what I see?” the younger man asked, pointing.

  “Looks like a feather to me,” Chas commented.

  “Yep, and there’s another one there,” he moved the beam. “And one over there,” he moved it again.

  “Somehow, I doubt that these folks pluck their chicken before they cook it,” Chas remarked. “Let me get some pictures, then we can collect a few of them,” he extracted a plastic bag and a pair of tweezers from his pocket. “You know where we have to head next, right?”

  “Please don’t say the garbage dump. I really dislike the garbage dump,” Spencer sighed.

  “I hope you’re not too fond of those shoes,” Chas chuckled.

  **

  Spencer desperately wanted a shower. A hot, soapy, week-long shower, which he would take while his current set of clothing burned in a fire pit. Standing knee-deep in refuse, he finally located a bag of trash from Rosemary Conrad’s next door neighbor and knew that he was at least in the right vicinity.

  “We’re close. I found the neighbor’s trash,” he grimaced, holding up a soggy envelope.

  “The glamorous world of private investigation,” Chas tried to smile while not inhaling through his nose. Crime scenes had their own olfactory challenges, but standing in the slime and sludge of the city dump would test the mettle of some of Calgon’s finest, Chas and Spencer being no exception.

  Spencer tore through several more bags of trash before finally striking pay dirt. “Got it,” he hollered, shocked that he’d been able to find the exact bag of trash that he needed.

  Chas picked his way over toward Spencer, who was holding open two sides of a torn plastic trash bag.

  “That’s definitely a pillow,” he nodded.

  “Well, it was a pillow,” Spencer corrected. “Hey, look at that,” he frowned, shaking some of the feathers to one side when he saw a metallic glint.

  Reaching a gloved hand down into the bag, he hooked his fingers under the metal and pulled out a lovely gold bracelet.

  “Interesting place to find something like that,” Chas mused.

  “Blood,” Spencer pointed at a spot on the metal.

  “We need to find out whose.”

  “I have my suspicions,” Spencer replied, slipping the bracelet into a plastic baggie.

  “I think we’re on the same page,” Chas nodded. “Let’s take the entire bag and sort through it in the alley behind the office. It can’t smell any worse than the technology center after Taco Tuesday.”

  “Probably smells better,” Spencer grinned, eager to leave the dump. “At least we got what we came for.”

  When they got back to Chas’s car, they wrapped the trash bag inside two more plastic bags, to contain both the evidence and the smell, and placed it in the trunk. Chas had just turned over the ignition when the text tone on his phone went off. Reading the message, his expression darkened.

  “Bad news?” Spencer inquired, frowning.

  “Not yet, but it could head that way fast. Solinsky is recommending to the Chief that we call it a murder/suicide and leave it at that in order to spare the family more grief.”

  “How can the detective declare the case closed when he doesn’t even have the coroner’s report yet?” Spencer was astonished and troubled.

  “Sounds to me like Rosemary Conrad got to him,” Chas mused.

  “So, now what?”

  “Now, I’m going to drop you off at the office to sort through Rosemary’s trash, and I’m going to go share what we’ve found so far with the Chief. Tim Eckels hasn’t been giving Solinsky any preliminary information because he knows that he’s a loose cannon, so the Chief may not even know that there was no powder residue on Dora Lyndhurst’s hands or body.”

  “Well, yeah, but technically, the pillow could have gone a long way toward preventing that,” Spencer pointed out.

  “Agreed, but when it’s all put together, with everything else that we’ve found, there’s enough compelling evidence to at least bring Rosemary in for questioning.”

  “I guess I’ll be talking to the bridge ladies to check out her alibi,” Spencer mused.

  “Definitely,” Chas agreed, just as his text tone went off again.

  “What now?” Spencer asked.

  “This is from Holly. She has the bags of clothing that Rosemary’s assistant dropped off at the thrift store, so when you’re done with the trash, you can get started on the clothing. Pull out any items that may need to go to the lab for testing.”

  “You got it,” Spencer nodded. “Let me know how it goes with the Chief.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  Beulah was humming to herself while frosting the last batch of cupcakes for the day when Missy came into the kitchen.

  “Beulah, my husband Chas is here, and he’d like to speak with you, if you don’t mind. I’ll finish up these cupcakes if you want to go up front. Just holler at me if someone comes in,” Missy directed, washing her hands.

  “Well, it won’t be no hardship at all for me to set a spell with that fine looking man of yours,” Beulah grinned mischievously and headed for the front of the shop.

  “Thanks, Beulah,” Missy called after her.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chas. How are you doing today?” Beulah smiled in greeting. “Can I get you a little snack?”

  “No, I’m good, thanks Beulah,” Chas held up a hand. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “You too. What can I do for you?” she settled her considerable bulk into one of the chairs.

  “I’m going to be talking to little Kaylee today. I’m hoping that she’s recovered at least a bit, and she seems to be very comfortable around you, so I wonder if you wouldn’t mind accompanying me when I go to visit her.”

  “Oh yes, I’d love to check on that little peanut again,” Beulah nodded. “When were you thinking?”

  “Now works for me,” Chas glanced at his watch.

  “But, Miss Missy…” Beulah began.

  “She said that now was a good time. She doesn’t have any deliveries and the breakfast rush is over.”

  “Alright then, Mr. Chas. Just let me hang up my apron and get my purse and we can go,” the elderly woman braced herself on the table and stood.

  **

  “My mother doesn’t like to have anyone in her home when she’s not here,” Jeannie explained apologetically when Chas and Beulah showed up to see Kaylee.

  “It’s your home too, and you’re a grown woman. You should be able to make decisions about having company whether your mama is here or not,” Beulah frowned, hands on hips.

  “Maybe you and Kaylee could come out and we could go for a walk to the park?” Chas suggested, taking a more diplomatic approach.

  “I really have quite a lot on my plate right now,” Jeannie crossed her arms, absently rubbing one elbow as though it itched.

  “How big can that plate be? Ain’t much you can do when you’re taking care of a young child full time,” Beulah commented.

  “It’s a little overwhelming,” Jeannie admitted.

  “Then come on out here with the girl and we can keep track of her for a bit,” Beulah shrugged.

  “I suppose it would be okay,” she nodded finally. “Let me go get Kaylee and put her shoes on.” She shut the door, leaving them standing on the porch.

  “That’s just crazy, not letting folks in cuz her mama ain’t home. How old is that girl?” Beulah shook her head and Chas looked at her with amused admiration, wondering what it must be like to deal with the world and not worry about social filters of any sort.

  Kaylee immediately jumped into Buwa’s arms when she spotted the grandmotherly-looking woman, wrappin
g her arms tightly around Beulah’s thick neck.

  “Buwa,” she grinned, touching the wrinkled cheeks.

  “Hello, peanut. I missed my girl,” Beulah cooed. “We gonna have us a talk today, okay?”

  Kaylee stuck her fingers in her mouth and nodded. Chas was encouraged.

  “How well does she speak?” he asked Jeannie in a low voice.

  “She hasn’t been speaking much at all lately, but before…things happened, she could use sentences. She was a little hard to understand sometimes, but she did talk,” her aunt explained.

  “Good,” Chas nodded. “I’d really like to find out if she saw or heard anything on that day.”

  “I don’t know how much help she’ll be,” Jeannie sighed. “I’ve tried asking her about it, but she just stares at me.”

  “Maybe she’ll tell Buwa all about it,” Chas smiled encouragingly.

  “Maybe,” Jeannie murmured.

  **

  “Do you remember when your mama wouldn’t wake up?” Beulah asked gently. Kaylee sat on her lap on a park bench. She nodded solemnly, fingers in her mouth.

  “Did someone hurt mama?”

  Kaylee’s eyes grew wide and she nodded slightly.

  “Ohhh…I’m so sorry, peanut. Can you tell me who hurt mama?” Beulah brushed her hair back from her face and kissed her forehead.

  “Mama fall,” Kaylee looked down, her lower lip poking out a bit.

  “Yes she did,” Beulah nodded, catching Chas’s eye to make sure that he’d heard. He had. “Was somebody there when mama fell?”

  “Da.”

  “Your daddy?”

  Another nod.

  “Was anybody else there?” Beulah prodded gently, as Kaylee played with her scarf.

  Kaylee raised her eyes and looked at Beulah, seeming scared.

  “It’s okay, child. You can tell old Beulah all about it.”

  The child’s eyes darted to and fro and her lip quivered slightly.