Fatal Divisions

by Claire Booth

  ‘What the hell is this?’ She got out of her car. ‘Are you insane? Get her inside.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ Sam said, his fingers tightening on the woman’s arm. ‘No one’s answering the buzzer.’

  All the starch went out of Sheila. Her shoulders sagged forward. ‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘Molly. It’s just her. And Earl. I need …’

  She was pulling out her phone when a wail let loose from the back of her cruiser. It bounced around the garage, its emotion rattling the rafters. The old man in Sheila’s backseat pressed up against the metal grill separating the seats.

  ‘Tina! Is that you? Where the hell have you been? Are you OK? Where’s the money?’

  Sam turned on the woman. ‘Is that your name? Tina?’

  She tried to move away, but he still had her arm.

  ‘No way. Not after what you put me through tonight.’ He marched her over to Sheila’s car. The old man’s yelling got louder. ‘Sir, you can identify this woman?’

  ‘Her name is Tina Hardy. She’s his secretary,’ Sheila said.

  How would Sheila know that, he wondered. Why were there suddenly people he didn’t know anything about involved in his case? He had tons more questions, but she interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘What the hell happened to your face?’

  Sam shot a pointed glare at his prisoner and her similar scrapes. Sheila started to say something but stopped when the woman shifted her position, trying to avoid looking at the old man as he sobbed about her ruining everything. She tried to shield her face with her hair, but as the old man went on, she began to stiffen.

  ‘You started it,’ she burst out, turning toward Sheila’s car as much as she could with Sam still gripping her arm. ‘You’re the one who ran your business into the ground. You’re the one who stole from investors to keep it going. You’re the one who hid the money where a semi-computer-literate five-year-old could’ve found it.’

  The old man sagged against the locked car door and it became harder to hear him through the open driver’s window. ‘Not my business. I’m talking about my wife. My marriage. You ruined it. She thinks I killed you.’

  ‘That was what everyone was supposed to think, wasn’t it?’

  FORTY

  Hank walked into view. He’d heard Lew’s lamenting and Tina’s response as he tried to recover from the shock of squad cars sticking out of his sally port like it was the line at a Hardee’s drive-thru. He’d parked off to the side, fastened Belinda Ullyott’s handcuffs to his car’s metal grate – he’d had bad luck before with manacled backseat prisoners – and got there just in time for one of the main topics he wanted to talk about with Ms Risen from the Dead.

  ‘When did you decide to dump your own blood in the bathtub?’

  Everyone else recoiled, but Tina smiled slightly.

  ‘Oh, you found that? Was I officially a murder victim?’

  There was a mix of incredulity and thrill in her voice that Hank saw Sammy squelch with a squeeze of his hand on her bicep. Hank looked at her and felt cold – an icy anger that was close to freezing into no feeling at all, which he knew would be far worse. He’d been desperate to save this woman, then anguished that she was probably dead. Instead, she’d been busy traumatizing his family and committing murder in his county. He stared at her and thought about that. She returned his gaze, probably unaware that he was Lew’s relative. That his uniform sleeve was still soaked with Fin’s tears. He wasn’t going to dignify her question with a response.

  ‘The blood?’ he repeated.

  ‘I did it just before I left,’ she said. ‘I’d put the papers under the mattress and was thinking it wasn’t … definitive enough. It didn’t necessarily say that I’d been taken. So I cut myself in a few spots and smeared it all around. It didn’t take that much, really. I was kind of surprised. Then I cleaned it up. You guys would still see it with your lights, but I was pretty sure you wouldn’t know how much had really been there.’

  ‘And your purse?’ Hank said.

  She gave a little smile. ‘If you’re asking, that means you found it. I snuck into their backyard the night I left town.’

  Hank glanced at Lew through the car window just as the old man realized what she’d done. His face went slack and then flushed red. ‘You tried to frame me? My God, what did I ever do to you?’

  Sheila moved forward like she was going to get back in the car and remove Lew from this whole bizarre confluence. Hank caught her eye and she stopped. He was hesitant to disrupt the dynamic when both suspects were talking so freely. Plus, Fin would never get the opportunity to yell at Tina Hardy like this – he might as well let Lew do it.

  ‘You steal my money – which I needed for the original investors, the ones who were getting suspicious. And to pay the store leases and the payroll and my mortgage. And then you not only fake your death, you set me up for it? How dare you? I gave you a job.’

  ‘You’d already run that place into the ground,’ she said.

  Lew yelled a denial, then slumped against the seatback.

  ‘When did you figure that out?’ Hank asked her.

  She’d known since she randomly stopped in at the Kingdom City store in early summer and seen the empty shelves. She’d just prepped a big investor pitch for Lew, she said, and there was no way the reality matched what he was saying in that prospectus. That prompted her to dig into the files on his personal laptop when he left it unattended at the office. That’s where the emails and most of the documents under the mattress came from. ‘They weren’t hard to find. No security at all. He uses his wife’s birthday as his password.’

  That set off a fresh tirade from Lew. She shut him up when she started talking about the investor they landed in October. Some decent-sized venture capital firm wanting to plump up their ‘heartland’ portfolio. Five million dollars. Then three million of it went straight back out to the Discount Express vendor, for items she knew weren’t at the stores or the warehouses. She poked around some more and found a banking app hidden on Lew’s laptop. Once she broke in with the same wife-birthday password, she saw that the deposit was exactly the same amount. So she emptied the entire account.

  ‘That kind of thing would leave digital fingerprints all over the place,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘But what was he going to do, call the police? Excuse me, my embezzled money has been stolen, can you help? No way. Plus, he didn’t necessarily know at first who did it. Just that it’d been done.’

  ‘But Vic Melnicoe figured it out.’

  Sammy looked like he hadn’t intended to say that out loud. Tina started to nod, but everyone swung back to Lew, who was pressed against the window again.

  ‘That’s what Vic’s been telling you?’ he shouted. ‘That he figured out what I’ve been doing? Hogwash. He was part of it. I paid him to help with the inventory records. It made it more solid if it came from the store that way, instead of being changed at the office. When you took that money from my Express account, I couldn’t pay him. I owed him for months’ worth of work.’ Lew slumped back on to the seat. ‘What a way for him to get back at me.’

  Hank looked at Sam, who looked at Sheila, whose look clearly said This isn’t my case – you two break your own bad news. Hank bent to get a better view of his uncle-in-law and swore at himself. Lew’s face was splotchy and worryingly swollen. Even with his hands cuffed in front of him, it still had to be agony for a set of eighty-one-year-old shoulders. He opened the car door and unlocked the cuffs. Once free, the old man practically collapsed on the seat. Hank reached out and took his pulse. Steady, thank God. He straightened and turned to Tina, who was once again trying to avoid Lew’s gaze.

  ‘Did Vic come down here to Branson searching for you?’ Hank asked. She nodded.

  ‘Why’d you pick here?’ he said.

  ‘I had the keys to the new store that the agent mailed. So I knew I could get in, stay there while I got sorted out. I heard you could get a good fake ID here. But when I got down here, that …
didn’t turn out to be the case. I’d left mine in the purse I buried in Lew’s flowerbed, and I couldn’t get a fake one, so I … I was just stuck. My car broke down. I walked around off the highway until I found one I could steal. Then that Vic asshole shows up. Demanding money. I said he already made enough from Lew. He told me I’d taken it all. And he wanted it back, plus more.’

  Lew stopped rubbing his wrists and struggled to climb out of the car. Hank took his elbow and helped him.

  ‘He knew where you were and he didn’t tell me?’ Lew said. He looked around. ‘Well, where is he?’

  They all stayed quiet. Hank looked pointedly at Tina. Time to see if keeping them together out here would pay off. ‘Answer him.’

  FORTY-ONE

  She clearly hadn’t been expecting such a direct order. Hank could see her frantically think through different responses as she shifted from foot to foot. Finally, she decided on one.

  ‘Not till I get a deal. If I did something to him, you’ll never know what it was or where he is – unless I get a deal with the prosecutor.’

  Hank couldn’t keep the smile from creeping across his face. He started to speak and then saw the same smugness on Sam’s face. His scratched, scraped, bruised face. Hank wasn’t the only one who’d been injured by this woman. He nodded at his deputy. Take it from here.

  ‘You bashed him over the head and dumped him out east,’ Sam said. Her face drained of color and then flushed a deep red. ‘But you didn’t take him far enough out. Waste of a good trip to the woods, if you ask me. So now he’s in the Springfield morgue. Where he’s giving us all kinds of evidence.’

  She looked from Sam to Hank and back, the import of that hitting like a meteor impact.

  ‘We’ve even got blood in the back room of the empty store. So we don’t need to talk to you anymore,’ Hank said. Having her say that Melnicoe had come to her demanding money should be good enough to establish motive in court. And she admitted to having the store keys – if the blood there came back as Melnicoe’s, the case was almost airtight. ‘You can go get nice and comfortable in a jail cell. Because you’re going to be there a long time.’

  Sheila stepped forward and tapped out a text on her phone. The door into the jail building began to swing open. Both Tina and Lew jerked back. If that simple thing scares them, Hank thought, wait until they get to the state penitentiary. Sam stepped forward, but Tina refused to move. He took hold of her other arm as well and, clearly fed up, pushed her inside. The door was pulled shut by Earl, manning a post that was definitely not his authorized reception desk work station. Hank turned to Sheila but she already had a hand up to stop him. ‘Just don’t,’ she said.

  Then a voice Hank had never heard before boomed through the large space.

  ‘So now is someone going to let me the hell out of here?’

  A very large man in a City of Branson police uniform was sitting in the squad car that had brought in Tina Hardy. He must be the one who’d called with questions about Sam’s deputy credentials. Hank hadn’t even noticed he was there. He bit back a groan. An outside agency had just witnessed a highly unorthodox interrogation, a potential escape, and several half-ass prisoner transfers. Fantastic.

  ‘Do we have anybody who can open that?’ Hank asked, pointing to the other garage door opposite the already open one. Once it was raised, the Branson officer could just pull straight out without having to reverse. Sheila texted, and a minute later it rolled up. Technically that wasn’t supposed to happen while the first door was still open, but what the hell. The guy had already seen half a dozen procedures violated in as many minutes. Hank’s thank you was overpowered by an eye roll and an engine roar as the officer drove away.

  ‘We’re just going to pretend that none of this ever happened,’ Sheila said, waving a hand that encompassed both the sally port delays and the ongoing jail staffing mess.

  ‘And pray that guy does the same thing,’ Hank said as Branson PD disappeared from view.

  Sheila muttered in agreement as she stomped over to the door and was buzzed inside. Hank turned back to Lew, who was leaning heavily against the back fender. Hank took his left arm to guide him toward the door, but Lew laid his right hand on Hank’s coat and stopped him.

  ‘She really killed him?’ When Hank nodded, his head slumped forward on to Hank’s chest as well. ‘God, he was just a kid looking to make some extra money. All he did was generate false sales reports.’

  And get greedy, Hank thought. Although yes, as blame went, he deserved a lot less of it than the other players in this. He certainly didn’t deserve to die.

  ‘Did you tell Vic to come down here, Lew?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, no. Why would I do that? I needed him where he was. Plus, I owed him money. You think he would have followed my orders if they went beyond what his duties were? No way.’

  Hank looked at his uncle-in-law. ‘And I think he would have. If you told him that was the only way to get the money. How did Vic even know that Tina was in Branson? How did he know to come here?’

  Lew pushed away from Hank, who reflexively rested his hand on the Glock in his holster.

  ‘I swear to you, I didn’t know Tina was down here. I knew the keys to the Branson store had never arrived. Vic knew, too. Because he was supposed to be the one to come down here and set it up, but he couldn’t do that until we got the keys and the paperwork. We did get the papers, but not the keys. I didn’t know she had them.’

  Either Vic figured out on his own when Tina disappeared that she probably stole the keys, or Lew was lying. ‘When did you know that Tina was the one who stole from you?’

  The third day she didn’t come to work, Lew said. The first day she called in. The second day she didn’t, and he just pulled an excuse out of his hat. And started getting suspicious. When she didn’t show the third day, he checked the Discount Express account and saw the theft. He was so stunned he fled the office, falling on his way out and scraping himself up on the pavement. He needed time to figure out what to do without anyone getting suspicious, so the next day he invented Tina’s sick mother.

  ‘And when Fin came to stay with us? She left you for weeks. Didn’t you think she was suspicious?’

  ‘I prayed that she wasn’t. When you brought her back, I was so relieved. I missed her so much. And then in the middle of the night Thursday I saw her going through my study. I thought she’d found something down here when she was staying with you. Maybe Tina’d contacted her. Maybe … I don’t know. I got scared. So instead of going to work the next morning, I drove down here.’

  Hank wanted to throttle him. ‘Why not just close the business if you couldn’t raise the money?’

  ‘Because it was everything. My whole life. I knew I could turn it around. If Tina hadn’t stolen all that, I would’ve been able to.’ He looked up at Hank, his face only inches away. ‘It was only a … a temporary kind of borrowing.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t. It was a crime. From the beginning. It was a rock you threw in a pond, Lew, and the ripples came out in every direction. That’s how it always happens. Things you don’t expect. And consequences that are going to hit all sorts of people.’ He touched his tear-dampened sleeve. ‘Your employees will have to testify in a federal investigation. Your niece will have a felon for an uncle. And your wife …’

  He let Lew contemplate that last sentence for a moment, then led him into the building, the steel door clanging shut behind them.

  FORTY-TWO

  This seemed like the hundredth time Sheila had walked the cellblocks since she’d entered the jail yesterday morning. Now it was past midnight, the lights were dim – and by some small miracle that she certainly deserved at this point in her day, the inmates were quiet. So too, unfortunately, was the control room. The graveyard shift hadn’t shown up for work. It was just her and Molly. She’d coaxed Earl into going home about an hour ago and practically shoved Hank out the door when he tried to stay.

  She turned and walked back up the other side of the corridor and cam
e to a slow stop as she saw that she wasn’t the only one still awake. Lonnie Timmons sat on his bed with his elbows on his knees, rubbing at a cut on his hand. He looked up at her, but otherwise had no reaction at all. She’d planned to tell him in the morning, but what the hell.

  ‘We arrested someone for your father’s murder.’

  ‘Really.’ Emotionless.

  ‘It was a woman named Bee. She was a friend of your mother’s.’

  Now an eyebrow went up. ‘What the hell’s my mom got to do with it?’

  It would mean divulging her theory of the crime, but she owed him some kind of explanation at least. Or maybe Clyde was the one who owed him. Bee Ullyott definitely owed him.

  ‘We think this lady helped your mom along, on the day she died. Put something in her IV bag. And then …’

  She stopped. Lonnie’s mouth had dropped open. As she stood there, his eyes filled with tears. ‘I’ll be. The old bastard was right. She didn’t die of natural causes. You can prove it?’

  Sheila shook her head. ‘But sometime recently, your dad ran into this woman for the first time in years and started to figure it out. So she killed him to keep him from reporting it to the police.’

  Lonnie put his head in his hands, his elbows still balanced on his knees. ‘So it’s just the car theft and the motel stuff, then? You ain’t charging me with murder?’

  ‘No, we’re not. But the rest could still get you a prison sentence.’

  He let out a chuckle that held no laughter. ‘Yeah. Right where he wanted me to end up.’

  Sheila wasn’t so sure about that.

  ‘How much did you need? When you asked your dad for money?’