Murder Down Under

by K. J. Emrick

  “We needed to talk to you,” Darcy said. “About why you were poisoned.”

  Alec blinked several times as his eyes grew wider. “Whad’ya mean, why I got poisoned? The coppers said it was an accident. I sent ya looking at Mabel Quinn just to get ya out of me hair.”

  “Well, whatever your reasons, Mister Beaudoin,” Jon said, “it led us to more than we bargained for. You and the others weren’t poisoned accidentally. You were all targeted.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. “Targeted?” he repeated, reminding Darcy for just a moment of the rosella parrot they’d seen on their trek into the National Park. A red faced, puffed out parrot. “Targeted?”

  Jon motioned with one hand. “Can we come in and explain it to you? Something’s going to happen tonight, and I think you need to understand it.”

  “What’s going to happen?” Alec quietly asked.

  “Can we talk inside?”

  “Uh, sure mate. I guess. Not like I’ve got anywhere to go.”

  He held the door open for them and then led them back to the living room. It looked just as dirty as it had when they were here yesterday. If anything, there were a few more pizza boxes added in to the piles of stuff around the floor.

  “So what’s gonna happen?” Alec asked, his curiosity barely contained.

  Darcy and Jon shared a look. This was what they wanted to tell Alec first, before getting Senior Sergeant Cutter into the act. “What’s going to happen,” Jon said, “is the Lakeshore Police are going to arrest the person responsible for poisoning you and the others. Including Lindsay Burlick.”

  Blankly, Alec stared at them, one to the other, and back again. “I don’t understand. What could you possibly have found out in a day that the coppers hereabouts don’t already know?”

  “Well, quite a bit, as it turns out,” Darcy told him. “It helps that we kept an open mind and didn’t put our heads in the sand.”

  It didn’t hurt that she could ask ghosts for information either, or have dreams where she talked to her Great Aunt Millie. Everything had started coming together right here, though, with something Alec himself had said.

  “It’s hard to understand unless we spell it out,” Darcy said. “Right now, Kevin Powers is explaining it to the Federal Police. We’ll give you the reader’s digest version.”

  “Ya know,” Alec grumbled, “it’s awfully hard to understand ya with that accent of yers. What’s a reader’s dice virgin?”

  Somehow, Jon managed to keep from laughing about whose accent was harder to understand. “Sorry,” he said. “We didn’t mean to confuse you. It’s just a saying. It means, here’s the short version. After we spoke to you, we went over to see Lindsay’s fiancé. She knew these weren’t random poisonings, and they weren’t accidental.”

  “Coppers say otherwise,” Alec insisted.

  “We know. Still. Lindsay’s fiancé—Maureen is her name, by the way—was pretty convincing. She also had some letters to show us. Seems a man had been interested in Lindsay, not realizing she was already engaged. Maureen was sure whoever sent the letters was the man who had poisoned Lindsay.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Alec wanted to know. “Don’t explain who wanted to poison me.”

  “Well, actually it sort of does.” Darcy took up the explanation from there. “We were looking for a connection between the four of you. You, Lindsay, and the other two victims. We couldn’t find anything at all. According to Kevin Powers, neither could the Lakeshore police. So, there had to be some other explanation.”

  Alec rolled his eyes as he walked away, through a door that led to a small and dingy kitchen. Darcy and Jon followed him.

  “Don’t sound to me,” Alec said to them, banging a teakettle down on the stove and snapping on the burner, “like you two blokes know yer head from yer tail. All I know is if someone poisoned me then I don’t deserve to be treated like a criminal.”

  “The police will be gone shortly,” Jon said to him. “I promise. Just as soon as they make their arrest.”

  “So it was Mabel?” Alec asked, his back still to them. “Is that what yer telling me? Crazy old Mabel with her witchcraft and her séances?”

  Darcy let the comment slide. She didn’t practice witchcraft, but she had done more than her fair share of communications. She certainly wasn’t crazy because she had a gift that she used to help people.

  Maybe Mabel wasn’t crazy, either.

  “It wasn’t Mabel,” Jon answered matter-of-factly. “We thought that at first, too, but only because of how she acts. Hard to hold that against a person. I mean, look at you, Alec. You live in a house that you apparently haven’t cleaned in months. Nobody holds that against you, do they?”

  “Too right, they don’t.” He went to the cabinets, banging the doors opened and closed until he came out with a tin of aromatic tea. “I work hard. I work in that quarry week after week for just enough quid to go back there and work some more. So I don’t have time to spic and span me house. Who cares?”

  “Exactly my point. So, we can’t suspect Mabel just because of how she acts or lives.”

  Jon pulled out one of the battered wooden chairs from the small, square kitchen table, and sat down. Darcy choose to keep standing. They might not hold the unclean state of his house against Alec, but she wasn’t quite able to bring herself to sit down here, either.

  Alec shook his head. “I suppose yer right.” He spooned out heaping amounts of the finely ground tea into three ceramic cups just as the kettle started to whistle. “Why don’t we have us some tea while the two of ya tell me the rest of the story.”

  “We really should wrap this up,” Darcy said to Jon. “Kevin will be here any second, and so will the press.”

  “The press?” Alec parroted, his eyes going wide. Like the rosella’s. “What’d’ya do that for? I don’t want to talk to those buggers. It’s bad enough I got me name dragged through Hell and back when this happened. I don’t need it done all over again.”

  Jon and Darcy exchanged a glance. “Really?” Jon asked. “I thought you’d be happy to know who poisoned you and killed those other three people.”

  The kettle was screaming. Alec took it off the hot burner and shut the stove off, silencing the shrill whistle. “Okay, smart guy. Why don’t ya tell me who this arrest is going to be, then. Who did it?”

  Picking up one of the cups from the countertop, with its dry tea still inside, Darcy set it closer to her and then held onto it tightly. She smiled at Alec, glad to let him in on the secret. “It was really your information that led us to the killer, Alec. So, thank you.”

  “Don’t be stringing me along, Miss Darcy Sweet. Just tell me. Who poisoned me?”

  “Well, as it turns out,” Jon said, standing up again, “the person who poisoned you…is you.”

  Alec’s face drained of color, the red heat of his anger turning to a pale white. “What’d’ya say?”

  “We said it was you,” Darcy answered him. “See, if you hadn’t told us that you sort of knew one of the victims, and that her name was Lindsay, we might never have talked to…her housemate.”

  She’d almost said “talked to her ghost,” but that was information better left secret.

  Jon had placed himself protectively between Alec and Darcy. That suited Darcy just fine, but she wished Kevin would hurry up outside and get in here. Jon advanced a step, and Alec retreated, backing up against the sink.

  “Yer mad, is what you are,” Alec said, but his voice was shaky, and his eyes were darting all around like he was looking for a way to escape.

  “There’s only one of us in this room who’s crazy,” Jon said to him. “That’s the man who killed the woman who didn’t return his affections, and then killed two other people to cover the crime up. On top of that, he even poisoned himself to keep from being a suspect. You know who that person is, Alec?”

  “Yer bonkers! I told ya, I hardly even knew Lindsay. How would I know she was engaged to Maureen?”

  “But
you did, didn’t you Alec? When I told you about it before, in the living room, you didn’t even react. You didn’t flinch, you didn’t ask me questions, you didn’t say a word when I said Lindsay was engaged to a woman named Maureen. That’s because you already knew. You knew, because you wrote letters to her hoping she would fall in love with you. Hoping she might feel for you the way you felt about her. The letters were typed, of course, so we don’t have your handwriting on them. But there was a dark stain along the edges. I'm betting if we had the letters analyzed, we’ll find out that stain is rock dust. The kind of dust that someone who works in a rock quarry would get all over their hands.”

  And their faces, Darcy thought, looking at Alec. And their arms, and their clothes, and seriously, when was the last time Alec took a bath? Any sane woman would say no to this man.

  Alec crossed his arms and met Jon’s stare now, a little of his anger from before returning. “Typed letters. A dead girl and her fiancé. Heh. Seems to me ya ain’t got anything that’d prove nothing. Yer some great detective in the States, are ya? Well, here in the Oz, if ya ain’t got proof, ya ain’t got squat.”

  “That’s what this is,” Darcy said, holding up the cup with its tea inside. “You knew where the passionfruit vines grow because of where you worked. Easy enough to find. Mrs. Havernathy in town uses the same patch of fruit, I think, for her jam. I had a nice chat with her. She knows to only use the ripe fruit, because the leaves and the flower and the rinds of the green fruit break down into cyanide. If someone eats too much of it, they can get poisoned. More can kill.”

  She held the cup out for him to see. “That’s what you put in here, isn’t it? Tea mixed with dried and ground up passionfruit leaves. Maybe even some rind from the unripe fruits? The Lakeshore police weren’t causing you any trouble, but we were. So you were going to get rid of us, too. Weren’t you?”

  He didn’t even bother to deny it. He hung his head, and took a ragged breath. “When I found out Lindsay was engaged to another sheila, I blew me stack. Went nuts. I meant to scare her. That was all. Make her sick, ride in and save her and be her white knight. Let her see what a man could do for her. She was marrying another woman! She turned me down because I got the wrong parts!”

  Having talked to Lindsay herself, Darcy doubted that. She’d gotten a feel for the emotions the woman had held even into death. Lindsay had been in love with Maureen. Alec hadn’t been able to accept that, and in his anger he killed her. The other victims were completely innocent, used to cover up Alec’s true motive. They’d paid for Alec’s obsession with their lives, too.

  Alec’s hands clenched into fists and Darcy knew what was coming in the instant before he did it. He shoved a shoulder low into Jon’s chest, forcing the taller man off balance and into the kitchen table. It was an explosive movement, full of pent up rage, and they were still trying to recover their wits as Alec picked up the teakettle full of boiling water from the stove and swung it high over his head.

  The echo of the gunshot was loud in the tiny space. Darcy ducked down, careful not to spill the poisoned tea. Jon was at her side instantly, covering her with his own body.

  In the next breath, Darcy saw Alec dropping the teakettle, scalding water pouring out of the hole that had been blasted in its curved side. The man screamed out and grabbed at his face, blisters already appearing across his forehead.

  “You two okay?” Kevin Powers asked from the doorway to the kitchen. Behind him, the two Federal Police officers had their guns drawn as well, held low in the cramped space.

  Kevin had fired a single shot at just the right moment, hitting the teakettle and disarming Alec.

  “We’re good,” Jon told him, lifting Darcy up to her feet. “You’re good, right?”

  She hugged him with her one arm, the proof of what Alec had done still in the cup in her hand. “Yes, I’m good. Wow. You cut that a little close, didn’t you Kevin?”

  He winked at her. “That’s the way we do it here in Australia.”

  The Federal Police officers put handcuffs on Alec. He was still moaning and crying out in pain, his face scalded red with white blisters down his scalp and cheek. Darcy couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for him. He’d already killed three people because a woman had spurned his advances. He’d given himself enough of the poison to throw everyone off his trail. And, he’d just tried to kill both her and Jon.

  Not to mention this was probably the first bath he’d had in a month or more.

  Hard to say he didn’t deserve it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Senior Sergeant Cutter was not happy.

  Darcy really didn’t care.

  He ranted at them in his office, going on and on about how foreigners from America didn’t have the right to get involved in the investigations his office was conducting. He ranted about how they were making his department look foolish, and what right did they have, and even threatened to call the United States consulate, although both of them knew that was just bluster.

  Then he got to the part that Darcy believed was really making him upset. He griped that they were going to lose their news cycle about the drug arrest of Roy Fittimer to this nonsense of poisoned passionfruit.

  That probably was Darcy’s fault, actually. She’d made the call to James Callahan, and told him he would have quite the story to report if he came to Evangeline Circle and watched the place being guarded by the Federal Police. He had, and when Darcy and Jon had followed behind their group leading a handcuffed Alec Beaudoin out of his house, Callahan had been smiling from ear to ear, snapping pictures and asking questions that went mostly unanswered.

  He didn’t seem to mind. He could put two and two together. Plus Darcy had already given him all the finer details during their phone call.

  “Not to mention,” Chief Cutter went on, pacing back and forth behind his desk, “you put one of my officers in danger! Kevin had to fire his service weapon to save yer lives, is what I’m told.”

  “He did,” Jon admitted, “and we’re grateful for it. I couldn’t exactly bring my own gun with me on the flight over, so.”

  He shrugged, and that seemed to infuriate Cutter more.

  “Look, Senior Sergeant,” Jon said to him, leaning forward in his seat, “in all seriousness, you had a murderer running around your town. We did a little bit to help you catch him, sure, but the credit is all going to go to your department. To Kevin, who deserves a lot of it, and to you as well. I don’t think you’re going to lose your news cycle. I think this is going to boost your exposure, if anything. The Lakeshore Police Station is going to be the envy of Australia for a long time to come.”

  Which is how Darcy had planned it.

  Cutter seemed to think about that. He stopped pacing and pursed his lips as he rubbed his square jaw.

  Then he sat down, throwing his hands in the air, as if that settled the whole issue. “Fine, then. Doesn’t answer all the questions though, does it? I’m still not getting how you two figured all this out in two days.”

  Darcy looked down at the floor. They had left out the part about the communication with Lindsay, for good reason. Jon’s eyes flicked to her briefly before turning back to Cutter. “A lot of it came from talking to the people in your town. Plus, Kevin was a big help. A bunch of little things added up. Alec mentioned he worked in the quarries west of here, and Mrs. Havernathy said she has a supplier who gets her wild fruits and berries from west of the town. Once we knew the source of the poison, all the rest of it fell into place.”

  “Didn’t suspect Mrs. Havernathy?”

  Darcy thought back to another old woman selling jam in Misty Hollow. Anything was possible.

  “Not this time,” Jon answered for them both. “It wasn’t easy to see, but once the picture was put together we just had to follow the trail from the poison to the murderer.”

  “So what did’ya have the Federal cops test the jams for, then?”

  “Simple,” Darcy told him. “To prove it wasn’t her. Someone else was making the po
ison.”

  “Right,” Cutter said, drawing out the word. “The poison. Know what we found when we searched through Alec’s house? A still. First we thought he was making turp…eh, homemade alcohol. Turns out he was distilling the sap from the vines. Passionfruit sap makes a sort of poison. Breaks down into cyanide in a body. Looks like he was using every bit of the plant he could.”

  Darcy had the image in her mind. A still, dripping liquefied poison from the leaves. Drip. Drip. Drip. Bad rain, from bad flowers.

  The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. The dream with her Aunt Millie. The words that Lindsay’s ghost had said to her. Bad flowers bring bad rain.

  “We saw the passionfruit vines,” Jon was saying. “They’re very close to where Alec works, in that quarry. It’s shut down now but apparently the yellow passionfruit stays in bloom through the winter.”

  Cutter looked at him oddly. Jon shrugged. “At least, that’s what Kevin said. Like I told you, he was a big help.”

  Opening and closing folders, mumbling to himself, Senior Sergeant Cutter finally just tossed a stack of them aside. “Right. Well. We figure Alec was dropping the poison into people’s drinks down at the Thirsty Roo. All random. Just to cover up his crime, like ya said. He knew how much to give himself to get sick but not die. Too bad for us. If there was any real justice in the world, bloke’d be dead like his victims.”

  Darcy didn’t know if that would be true justice, but she understood where the Senior Sergeant was coming from.

  “I’m surprised he left all of that there for you to find,” Jon said. “I guess we got lucky.”

  “Ha!” Cutter laughed. “Didn’t ya see his place? Not sure he ever throws anything away. Think he’s still got his first pair of undies.”

  “Well, that’s everything, then.” Jon stood up, and Darcy did the same, both of them only too glad to leave Senior Sergeant Cutter to claim the credit for everything that had happened.