Watkins - 05 - Poison Heart

by Mary Logue

  Meg stopped in her tracks. Ted told her that the elk had come at him in the woods and he had been scared and shot at it, but she could hardly listen.

  She thought of Harvey and knew she couldn’t say anything to Ted that wouldn’t be mean. She turned around and ran down the rows of apple trees.

  CHAPTER 20

  The quietness of the house struck Claire when she awoke. Ten o’clock. She hadn’t slept that late in years. Five hours of sleep would have to do. She had a busy day ahead of her.

  As she pulled on her uniform, she remembered what she had done, standing in front of Patty Jo Tilde and screaming at her. Good thing the sheriff had been there to stop her from doing anything more.

  Claire sank down on the floor, the anger pumping through her all over again. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone hurting her family. She had to get this woman safely behind bars for a good long while. Four counts of arson might do it.

  A distant train clattered along the track heading up to the Twin Cities. Other than that she could hear no noise. No one else was home. She rarely had the house to herself. Claire wished she could stay and enjoy it, but she needed to get moving, even if it was Saturday. She could take a day off next week. She wanted to search Patty Jo Tilde’s house before the woman was released from jail.

  Claire stumbled into the kitchen and found a note on the table from Meg that read: Went to get apples. Be back shortly. Kisses, Meg.

  Claire smiled. Apples and her sweet daughter. She looked over at the coffeemaker and saw that Rich had left her a couple of cups of coffee. Better and better. Then she saw the sack sitting next to her favorite mug and knew that he had also left her some pastry from the bakery.

  She poured coffee into her mug, grabbed the pastry and the cordless phone, and went out onto the front steps to call Dr. Wegman.

  He answered it on the first ring. “I’m cruising at seventy miles an hour down the freeway. What can I do for you?” His cell phone crackled and cut in and out as they talked.

  “We’re going to try to get into Patty Jo’s house today. Thought you might like to be part of the team. We caught her lighting candles around my old house last night. And it wasn’t for a prayer meeting.”

  “What time?”

  “I’m hoping by midafternoon. The sheriff’s tracking down a judge. Anything I need to remember to put in the search warrant?”

  “Be as broad and vague as you dare. Be sure to include phrases like ‘ignition materials,’ ‘fire paraphernalia,’ and—why not—’combustibles.’ ”

  Claire wrote the phrases down on her notebook. “Got it. This warrant will be a work of art.”

  “I’m playing eighteen holes, but I’ll keep my cell phone on. Where should I meet you?”

  She told him the Tilde farm.

  “Do you have her in custody?”

  “Yes, but she’s not talking. Or rather, she’s claiming it was just a coincidence that she was at my house at midnight when a fire started.”

  “So she’s a nut job. Arsonists usually are. With some luck she won’t need to confess to anything. I’m expecting the whole story to be in her house. You just have to know how to read it.”

  Meg was not happy to see her mom dressed in her deputy sheriff’s uniform. Working again today. Meg had been counting on spending some time with her mother that afternoon.

  “Apples!” her mother said in a pleased voice.

  “What’s with you?” Meg asked. She wanted to prick her mother, jab her, make her feel the same disappointment Meg did.

  “Maybe I’ll make an apple pie,” her mother suggested.

  Rich handed her a bag of apples. “Be my guest.”

  “When?” Meg asked, not believing her for a moment. Oh, sure, she believed that her mom wanted to make a pie, but not that she would ever get around to doing it. “When are you going to have time to do that? You’re going to work today, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but it won’t take long. I’ll be back long before supper. You want to help me make the pie?”

  Meg didn’t want to count on her mother. No promises. “We’ll see. My last pie was a disaster.”

  Meg recalled the pumpkin pie she had made for Thanksgiving. It had looked glorious. But she had inadvertently confused the sugar and salt, and it had tasted like crap—a bitter blow for a budding baker.

  “Have we got enough butter?” her mother asked Rich.

  Rich nodded. “We’re good on butter.”

  “I’m off to work. Trying to get a search warrant for Patty Jo’s. Looking forward to tearing her house apart.”

  “Do you have to clean up your mess?” Meg asked. She had a lot of curiosity about certain aspects of her mother’s job.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you search someone’s house? Do you clean up?”

  “No. We’re usually careful. We don’t make that big a mess. In Minneapolis, narcotics occasionally trashed a place—ripping open pillows and slashing couches looking for drugs. But we don’t destroy anything. We just look through everything. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the people even tell us where to look.”

  “Hey, we got news for you.” Rich grabbed Claire by the shoulders. “We might have figured out part of the mystery of Harvey. Tell her, Meg.”

  “Only if you promise that my friend won’t get in trouble. He didn’t mean to do it. He was afraid.”

  Her mother said, “Meg, I’ll try to protect him, but I need to know what happened.”

  “When we were at the apple orchard today we ran into this kid from my class, Ted. He told me he shot Harvey. But it was an accident.”

  Her mother thought for a moment. “An accident? What happened?”

  “Well, he was out hunting. He hunts squirrels. It’s legal, Mom. He told me. Anyway, all of a sudden he saw this elk. But he didn’t know what it was. He was scared, so I guess he shot it.”

  “Ted shot the elk. But he wasn’t near the farm, right?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So who cut the fence?”

  Rich said, “Maybe someone cut the fence to let the elk out and then Harvey got shot later. Maybe the two events aren’t related.”

  “That’s what it could have been,” Meg chimed in.

  “And with the info that Meg gave me, I don’t think it could be Patty Jo.” Her mom’s voice darkened. “Much as I’d like to blame her for everything bad that ever happened.”

  Meg was glad she had done something to help, but she wasn’t clear what it was exactly. “Why’s that, Mom?”

  “Well, you said Patty Jo asked you where the elk farm was. She wouldn’t have needed to if she had already been there to cut the fence.”

  “So who cut the fence?” Rich asked.

  Claire climbed into the squad car. “Good question.”

  Staring through the hole, Claire could see Patty Jo sitting in the corner of her cell on the edge of her cot. They had given her a private cell. The orange jumpsuit she was wearing hung on her. She had rolled up the sleeves and the legs. Orange was not one of her best colors. It made her skin look sallow.

  Claire waved the signed search warrant in front of the window to get Patty Jo’s attention. Then she spoke through the slit in the door. “Patty Jo. We’re going to your house.”

  Patty Jo turned and looked at Claire. “What?”

  “We’re going to search your house. I’d like the key to your house. Is it in your purse?”

  Patty Jo stood and walked up to the door, then peered through the peephole. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really.” Claire could see Patty Jo think about it. Most people would hand over the key, but Claire couldn’t tell with this strange woman.

  After a moment, Patty Jo told her the key chain was in her purse, being held by the bursar.

  Claire brought her the keys, and Patty Jo showed her which one was the house key.

  “Anything you want to say today?” Claire asked. “Before we go into your house? We are specifically looking for the material
s you used to start the fire. If you tell me where they are, we won’t have to dig up your whole house.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Do you believe yourself when you say that? Have you said it so many times now that you’ve persuaded yourself?” Claire knew she shouldn’t bother talking to her anymore, but she was curious.

  “You think you know me, but you don’t,” Patty Jo said.

  “No, I don’t think I know you at all. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “You can prove nothing.”

  “That will change soon.”

  Patty Jo looked at her and snorted. “You won’t find anything.”

  Claire felt her heart sink. The woman was as good as admitting she had done the deed, and also saying she knew enough not to leave a trace. Claire hoped to prove her wrong.

  When Claire drove up to the Tilde farm, the Citroën was parked in the driveway. She was surprised that Dr. Wegman had beaten her to the scene. She wondered when Doc started charging the client: from when he left the golf course, from when he arrived at the scene, or from when he started working? Maybe she should think about retiring and going into private practice. Perhaps when Meg graduated from college in ten more years.

  The Citroën was empty. She guessed Doc had gone into the barn. Burned-out buildings drew him like a moth to a flame. She was glad she had included the barn in the search warrant. A matter of similar crimes, she had explained to the judge.

  The sheriff had asked if she wanted to take anyone else with her to search the house. Usually they would have four or five deputies do a search, but she knew that more hands would not make this task easier. For the most part, she was going to give Doc his head and just follow him, especially in the barn. He was the master at the art of arson investigation. She knew she would learn something.

  Claire peeked into the remains of what was left of the barn. The charred beams were still holding up a few sections of the wall, but it did look like a good gust of wind would topple the whole fragile structure. Dr. Wegman was crouched in the far corner, stirring through the ashes.

  Without turning his head, he said, “It started here.”

  Claire hesitantly took a couple steps into the open area of the barn. “How can you tell?”

  “Work backward. The fire spread out from here. I can see the way it moved through the barn.” He stood up and waved his arms to show her where to look. “Up and out. Whatever caused it to combust began at this point.”

  Claire covered her mouth and tried to breathe into her hand. The dust from the stirred-up ashes was getting to her. “Do you want to keep looking here, or would you like to start in the house?”

  “Why don’t you go to the house and open it up and do a walk-through? See if anything jumps out at you. You might see something I won’t notice. This is a woman we’re talking about.”

  “You sure you don’t need me here?”

  He turned and looked at her. “I know you don’t want to be in this barn.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Liar.” He waved her away. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  Claire turned and left the barn thankfully. Even the smell got to her. Once, in Minneapolis, she had had to help sift through a house where three people died. Only their bones remained. She had had nightmares for months afterward. The smell in the barn brought that back vividly.

  Claire went to the house and stood on the porch, looking around. Patty Jo Tilde had left this house last night not knowing she wouldn’t be coming back. So Claire would walk into a house that was not prepared for her visit. Better and better. She would get much more of a sense of who this woman was. Claire put on her gloves.

  She fitted the key into the lock and turned. The door opened easily, and she walked into a small entryway that led into the living room and then to the dining room.

  The house had probably been built in the twenties or thirties. It had a bungalow feel to it, even though it was two stories tall. The house smelled stale, as if it had been shut up for a long time. There was a scrambled feeling to it. Boxes everywhere. As Claire looked around, she realized the furniture still was where they had put it when they moved things back into the house after the auction.

  Patty Jo Tilde wasn’t really living here anymore; she was perching, ready to take flight at any moment. She was on her way out the door. Claire was glad they had caught her before she ran.

  The kitchen was the only room downstairs with any semblance of organization. Claire decided to take a look upstairs before she started to look for specific items on her warrant.

  She climbed the stairs and found four bedrooms and one bathroom all off a central hallway. None of the bedrooms was large. One was filled with boxes from the auction. One had a bed but no bedclothes. The other small bedroom to the front of the house must be the one that Patty Jo was using. The sheets had been pulled up, but the bed wasn’t dressed. A book was next to the bed, a Harlequin romance with a bear of a man on the cover hugging a blond woman. The room was neither tidy nor messy. It just looked lived-in but clean.

  The larger bedroom with a double bed in it did not look as if it had been used recently, but the bed was made with a chenille bedspread. Claire guessed that had been Walter and Patty Jo’s bedroom when he was still alive. What did it mean that she didn’t sleep there anymore? Guilty conscience? Not really proof of anything. Women who had loved their husbands and mourned their passing often didn’t sleep in their conjugal bedroom after the death of their spouse.

  Claire walked to the window of the large bedroom and looked out over the land. From this vantage point, she could see the decomposing soybeans, left to rot in the field. No wonder Edwin was irked. More than the neglected bedroom, the rotted crop showed the contempt Patty Jo held for her husband. Still not evidence to bring to a jury.

  Claire unlatched the window and opened it. A soft cool breeze filled the room, lifting the curtains. This whole place needed to be aired out. It was time to see what she could find.

  The first place to look for candles, matches, and any accelerants was the kitchen. Claire walked down the stairs and scanned the kitchen. Pretty makeshift. Patty Jo had moved most everything out and hadn’t really put much back into its proper place. She had not settled again. Claire opened cupboards and found most of them bare. A few canned goods on a shelf in the pantry, a bag of flour, canned tomatoes. In the sink, a coffee cup with a pool of the dark brew in the bottom and a plate with bread crumbs on it. A snack before Patty Jo went out to start her last fire?

  Claire looked in all the logical places: under the sink, in the bottom of the pantry, in all the drawers. She found no matches, no candles. Then she went to the dining room. An oak built-in sideboard with glass-paned doors filled up one wall. Claire methodically went through the whole piece and found only one drawer of interest. Old Christmas candles, red and green, still stuck in Santa Claus candlesticks. She bagged them even though she knew they didn’t match the candle they had found at the last arson scene. That candle had been white. There were no white candles to be found.

  Doc walked in the front door. She held up the bagged candles. “This is it so far.”

  “Don’t think they’re a match.”

  “You know, if she bought white candles down at the Cenex and we found them here, wouldn’t they be a match for most of the candles in the county?”

  “Good point.” He looked around the house. “Moving?”

  “I told you about the auction.”

  “Oh, yeah. Why don’t you keep at it in here? I’m going to go check out the garage. The usual spot to keep most accelerants.”

  Claire decided to scour the upstairs. She went through every bedroom. In the master bedroom side table she found an old tube of K-Y jelly. Good for them, she thought. At least the old guy got something out of her. She bagged a pack of matches she found wedged under a chest of drawers as a shim, but wondered if they were too old to even light anymore.

  She finished off the living room, then decided it was time
to go down in the basement. She had always hated basements—some primordial feeling left over from dungeons, she imagined. This was a particularly damp and creepy basement. After stumbling around in the dank rooms with a dirt floor, flailing at old crystalline spiderwebs, she found calcified bar bait, poison left out for mice. Nothing that had been down in this damp basement longer than a day or two would ever burn, she thought as she climbed back up the rickety stairs.

  Wegman and she converged on the porch and both sat down to go over their loot.

  “Nice porch,” Doc said.

  “I wish we had a beer,” she said.

  “Sounds good. We’ve got diddly here.”

  They both looked at the pile of bagged items: stubs of red and green candles, old matches, a can of kerosene from the garage, and various burned items from the barn. Not much to go on.

  “I’ver never liked arson investigations,” Claire confessed. “Too tedious.”

  Doc nodded. “That’s what I like about them. You need to be tenacious. What I really love is finding these timers some arsonists use. Guys often create these elaborate timers to start fires. Then, when the fire is done, we can dig through the ashes and find them. They prove that the fire was deliberate and often give us a clue as to who started it. But a candle gives us nothing. They don’t last through a fire. Even if they do, they don’t prove it was deliberate, and they give us no clue as to who started it.”

  “I said I didn’t like arson.”

  “The problem is that our perp is a lady. Women have more common sense than men. They keep it simple.”

  CHAPTER 21

  It doesn’t matter how much of a feeling you have about this, Claire. You know that.” The district attorney, Mary Ann Jacobs, was even more rumpled than usual. She was wearing a suit that looked as if it had spent the night on the floor of a damp closet. Claire wanted to reach out and dust it off. A few white threads clung to the shoulders, but she resisted.

  “I can’t believe we can pin only one of these fires on her.”