Tommy St James Mysteries Boxed Set

by Kristi Belcamino

  Twenty-seven

  Martin Sandoval, the photo editor, filled Tommy in on what had happened the night before.

  “Kid got a call. A tipster. Told her she could find the River Killer’s next victim if she hurried. The tipster, or killer, which is what the cops think, told her to meet him on the invisible bridge at the Guthrie Theater at eleven.”

  “Great.” Tommy mumbled, waiting for Sandoval to go on. She could’ve watched from her balcony across the river.

  “So, kid goes, brings Parker, which was smart of her. They wait on the bridge. Nothing. Parker goes in to get them drinks at that little bar right there inside. When he comes back, kid is screaming bloody murder. She could see the killer and the college boy’s body down below by the locks. The killer waited for her to look over the edge of the bridge and then—get this—shone a flashlight on his face and then on the body and then started running and get this part, too—with the flashlight still on.”

  By the time Parker and Meg got down the steep theater’s escalators and made it to street level, they thought they’d lost him. But after they stumbled across the body lying there in the grass, they saw clear footprints in the mud so they both started running, following the footprints. The footprints led along the Mississippi River and then suddenly stopped, Sandoval said.

  “So, they are looking around and they see the guy, taunting them with his flashlight on a little hill above them. So, they book it up the hill, this time totally out of breath, with the kid madly snapping off photos of the guy running with the flashlight, but then, bammo. He disappears into thin air. So, they call 911 but first kid gets all kinds of shots of the crime scene.”

  Tommy is holding the paper taking in those shots. Yeah. A few were so good, gruesome, yet tasteful, that Meg might even win an award for them. The college boy’s foot up close in its Converse sneaker and then the rest of the body, where you can’t really see it, but can see the Washington Avenue bridge lit up in rainbow colors behind the body. Creepy and good. Tommy swallowed back her jealousy.

  “So,” Sandoval said, drawing out the word. “It looks like Meg might be taking over this story.”

  The bomb was dropped.

  “You’re kidding me?” Tommy could not have been more astonished. “I cover the first six bodies and she gets the last one and suddenly it’s her story.”

  She could see Sandoval’s Adam’s apple working furiously. “Well, technically she did shoot the first body. But that’s not the point. None of it matters because it’s not my decision. I had nothing to do with it. The executive editor and the publisher made the call this morning. What I think doesn’t mean diddly squat.”

  Sandoval usually played it safe. He was always too worried about losing his job and not being able to support his six kids to really have any balls.

  “Do you support their decision?” Tommy asked hesitantly. Maybe, just maybe if Sandoval backed her, she would feel a tiny bit better. But he only disappointed her again. Like usual.

  “St. James, you know I can’t play favorites.”

  “Whatever.” She stormed out of the newsroom. Forget him. She’d go to the crime scene herself. Whether he liked it or not.

  Driving over to the river, she dialed Kelly’s number.

  “I heard,” Kelly said. “Got my ass reamed as soon as I got to the station this morning. Apparently, they were trying to get ahold of me all night. I left my phone on the balcony.”

  Tommy felt bad for him.

  “It’s not your fault. It was a rough day for both of us yesterday. Besides, I thought you were off the case?”

  “Yeah, I did, too, but they wanted me to be back up last night. Oh well. They can’t have it both ways, now can they?”

  “I guess not.”

  Twenty-eight

  Now that Tommy was officially off the story she could get in trouble for showing up at the crime scene during the work day. But she didn’t care.

  With the wind whipping her hair she drove her Jeep without the top to the Guthrie museum, coming to a screeching halt at a spot out front. She dialed Parker and got the scoop on what happened the night before.

  “Sorry, I’m a sucker for brunettes. I’m weak. I know it.”

  “Screw you, Parker. That was my story.”

  “Calm down, Scoop. You can’t blame me for jumping on it.”

  “What?” Tommy nearly slammed the phone into the dash.

  “Onto the story. The story! We’re chilling and she gets a call from the freaking killer, dude. What the hell am I supposed to do? Go back to bed? I think not. Even you can’t blame me for going along for the ride.”

  “Whatever.” Tommy hung up on him, but he was right. She would have done the exact same thing. In a heartbeat. The killer had called Meg. Son of a bitch.

  Tommy made her way into the theater and then took the steep escalator up to the second floor. Then she made her way up to the endless bridge. The wind felt good outside as she made her way down the tiered steps to the edge of the bridge, which overlooked the Mississippi River.

  Holding her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, she peered down at the grassy banks of the river in the direction where Parker said they had seen the killer shining his flashlight on his latest victim. She saw trampled grass and knew that was the spot.

  The killer must have scoped out the spot beforehand to make sure he could be seen from the theater. Tommy looked around and vaguely wondered if the theater had surveillance cameras that might show visitors on the bridge from the last few days. She made a mental note to ask Kelly about that.

  Tommy held the lens of her camera up and using the telephoto lens took a look at the grassy area below.

  How in the hell did the killer manage to drag a body there without anyone seeing? He had run east of the crime scene with Parker and Meg chasing him and then disappeared.

  Then, as Tommy watched she saw movement. A man in a beat-up gray sedan had pulled over on the road near the grassy embankment. To her amazement, she saw the man look furtively around before he got out and walked over to the grassy area. He kept looking around him He was as skittish as a young colt.

  Tommy’s heart pounded and she immediately focused the lens on the car’s license plate and snapped off a few shots before zooming in on the man’s head. He had his back to her.

  Turn around, dammit! Tommy thought. Come on, turn.

  And then, he did. She fired off a series of snapshots at the same time he looked right up at her. The look on his face was pure panic.

  He ran to the car, jumped in and peeled out.

  Tommy didn’t lower her lens until the car swerved around a corner and out of sight.

  “Gotcha!”

  The chief looked at the picture on the big screen and shook his head.

  “It’s not enough.”

  Tommy had plugged her camera into the department’s large white board and was watching as the chief and the lead detectives viewed her photos of the man and the car.

  “We got surveillance on the guy. We ran his plates. Registered to Donald Callahan. Lives in the Phillips neighborhood.”

  Callahan. That name was all too familiar. Tommy would bet her left leg Don Callahan was Meg’s brother.

  Twenty-nine

  Tommy threw the photos down on Martin Sandoval’s desk. The photo editor looked up, confused.

  “The princess has a big brother who wanted her to get the story so he thought he’d help her along by killing a college kid and making sure she got the scoop. Nice guy, huh?”

  Within an hour, Meg and Sandoval were in a meeting with the executive editor.

  Tommy tried not to watch even though the glassed-in office made everything a stage. She peeked a glance every once in a while. Meg, who had her head in her hands, looked miserable.

  Tommy actually felt a little sorry for her. It wasn’t really her fault her crazy brother went off the deep end in his effort to help her.

  The police department held a press conference after lunch saying that the latest death was
not related to the River Killer’s spree.

  “This was a different individual acting on his or her own,” the chief said.

  Tommy who was snapping photos of the press conference raised an eyebrow at the reference to ‘his or her’ own. The chief said that detectives were furiously working the case, following leads and would report an arrest as soon as one was made.

  Kelly sent Tommy a text as she was driving back to the newsroom: “They’re questioning Callahan right now.”

  By afternoon, Meg was packing up her desk, throwing her personal belongings into a box, eyes red from crying. Tommy raised her eyebrow at Sandoval, but he put his finger to his lips. Tommy shrugged. Whatever.

  But she got up and visited Parker at his desk where a stack of police scanners squawked loudly.

  “Bum deal for the princess, huh?” Tommy said.

  “Worse than that.”

  “What’s worse than getting canned because your crazy brother killed for you?”

  “The cops want to question her.”

  “No shit. That should be obvious.”

  “No,” Parker said, turning to face Tommy. “They want to question her about her involvement in the murder.”

  Tommy raised an eyebrow.

  “I got it from a good source that college boy and Meg were at a frat party the night before. She sent him a text telling him to meet her at the river a few hours before he was killed.”

  “Holy smokes.”

  “Yep.”

  “Dude,” Tommy said, eyes wide. “You slept with a killer.”

  “I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All I gotta say is your standards are really, really slipping since you and me stopped getting busy.”

  “Very funny, Snap.”

  “What else you got?” Tommy asked.

  “My morgue source says kid died from a bullet to the back of the head.”

  “That’s not our killer’s m.o. is it? Assassinated mob style. Huh. Any coin in the throat?”

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t think so. It’s Callahan’s neck on this one.”

  Two hours later, the newsroom erupted in conversation. Meg and her brother had both been arrested on suspicion of murder.

  The executive editor left his office and seemed to be walking unusually fast on his way to the publisher’s office.

  People kept walking by Meg’s empty desk in photo and casting glances to see whether she had left anything behind.

  A few people stopped to talk to Tommy about it. She dismissed their curiosity by saying, “We weren’t friends.”

  Later, Kelly called and gave Tommy the inside scoop.

  Meg had totally been in on it. Her brother wept in the interview room, saying Meg hid his meds and told him that he had to do what she wanted or she would tell their mother that he molested her as a child.

  “Wow.” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, she’s a piece of work. He wept like a baby and fessed up to everything saying he did exactly what Meg said. But here’s the real kicker. She pulled the trigger.”

  Thirty

  Within hours it was revealed that the Callahan siblings had also killed Rourke, the young, redheaded cop.

  That did it.

  Tommy went to visit Meg in jail.

  She was surprised that Meg approved the visit. She expected the young woman’s eyes to be red and swollen from crying. She expected maybe even a shred of remorse. Instead, the woman who walked into the room in the orange jumpsuit held her head high and looked down her nose at Tommy.

  “What do you want?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “You’re young and dumb and probably mentally ill.”

  “I just signed a book deal. They are depositing one hundred thousand dollars in my bank account right now as we speak,” she said with a smirk.

  Tommy felt sick.

  She picked up her bag to leave. “Good luck with spending that money, sister. I don’t think you’re ever going to see the light of day again.”

  Thirty-one

  It had not gone the way he wanted at all and he was sick of waiting.

  All the attention was going to that idiot girl and her brother. Copycats. He had done everything he could to show that the two murders they’d committed were not connected to him, but nobody had paid attention.

  He was tired of waiting. He had watched from afar for far too long.

  He was bored with the geocache game. Now that the cops were onto that ploy, he was done with it. He had a better plan. The end game. The final tribute. The way to make his name and face go down in history.

  He was not the “River Killer.” He was Jack Sparrow, goddamn it.

  Thirty-two

  The twilight sky filled Tommy with both a sense of peace and excitement at the same time. She and Kelly sat on her balcony drinking beer and eating hot wings she’d picked up from one of the restaurants lining Main Street below.

  It was perfect summer fare and she was eating it with the perfect guy, she thought.

  The River Killer hadn’t struck for weeks and she wondered if he had been scared off by all the police and FBI coverage. From what she knew about serial killers it was unlikely he had stopped killing. What was more plausible was that he had taken his lustful desires to another college town to escape the heat.

  “We don’t have squat,” Kelly told her when she asked about the investigation. “Even the feds are thinking about packing it up and heading back to Quantico. They got nothing. We had a few leads on the coin, but the toy store where they were purchased ended up being a dead end.”

  “What toy store?”

  “That one down on Hennepin. Right across from that Indian food place.”

  “Oh yeah,” Tommy said. “I’ve been in there. They sell Abba Zabbas.”

  Kelly laughed. “You and your candy!”

  The next day Tommy swung by the toy store on her way to an assignment downtown.

  The clerk at the toy store, a kid with bright blue hair and nerdy glasses, perked up visibly when he saw Tommy walk in. She watched him run his fingers through his hair and pull his shoulders back.

  When she got close, the boy actually blushed.

  “Looking for a toy for your kid?”

  “Oh, do you think I’m that old?”

  He blushed more.

  “I actually came to talk to you,” Tommy said.

  The boy shifted uncomfortably.

  “I was hoping you might help me. I’m looking for a guy who is really, really into Jack Sparrow. You know from the Pirates of the Caribbean?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. We sell lots of stuff from that movie.”

  “Well, this would be a grown man who was especially interested in the coins.”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Are you a cop? The cops were already here asking me about this. I don’t know nothing. I sell those coins all the time.”

  “Oh no. I’m a photographer at the paper,” Tommy said, holding up her camera.

  “Oh.” The boy still looked a little suspicious. “I still don’t know anything. I don’t think we’ve sold those coins for at least a year.”

  Tommy scrunched her face, thinking. What else would a guy who called himself Jack Sparrow buy at a place like this? She looked around at the store and the answer was so obvious she smiled broadly.

  “How about this? Have any men bought the Jack Sparrow costume in that year you’ve worked here?”

  The boy exhaled loudly, relieved that he could help. “Totally. This one weird guy just bought one last month. He was freaky. Kept looking out the window to see if anyone was watching him. Acted like he was James Bond or something.”

  Tommy’s heart thumped madly.

  “Can you describe him?”

  Thirty-three

  Holy smokes, Tommy said.

  It couldn’t be. Or could it?

  The man the clerk described seemed very familiar.

  And the more she thought about it, th
e more it seemed to click. Hard to swallow, but not unbelievable.

  The kid had described the pathologist, Mark Dickinson.

  He said the guy who bought the Jack Sparrow costume was a tall, gangly man with long, unfashionable hair and small wire glasses.

  The victims had been poisoned with a substance that only Dickinson had found and identified despite other pathologists who had initially done the autopsies.

  In fact, the more Tommy thought about it, the more sense it made. Except the reason why he would do this? And then her blood ran cold as she remembered all the calls she had received.

  Tommy was out of breath by the time she raced up the police department steps and into the station.

  “I need to see the chief,” she panted to the snotty clerk who’d never liked her.

  “Sorry, he’s not available,” the pert clerk said without looking up.

  “Goddamn it then find him! This is a matter of life and death.”

  “Settle down. I’ll make a call.”

  After a few seconds of mumbling into the phone handset the woman turned to Tommy.

  “He’s up at the cabin at Mille Lacs this week. Costello is filling in.”

  “Then get me Costello!” Tommy was irritated she even had to ask.

  A few seconds later the woman hung up the phone and taking her time looked over at Tommy.

  “He’s at court right now.”

  “Kelly, then. Now.”

  While the woman called back to Kelly’s desk, Tommy tried his cell phone again. She had tried calling him a few times on the drive over but her call had gone straight to voice mail.

  The clerk hung up the phone.