Lorne hastily scribbled to the caller’s instructions, exhaling with an “uh-huh” every few seconds. Landon peered over his shoulder to see a woman’s name and an Ash Lake address.
“What?” Landon demanded. “What’s he saying?” Lorne answered him with a harsh wave to keep silent.
Suddenly the writing stopped, and Lorne’s face turned ashen. “Say what?” he whispered into the phone. He listened a few seconds to hear the caller correctly. “Why can’t you do that when you get the body?” Another pause. “And what if the cops trace it back to us? What then?”
Landon, bursting with curiosity, leaned closer to decipher the faint voice squeaking through the receiver. “What? Trace what back to us?”
Lorne pushed away from his brother and paced the kitchen floor. “Okay, but I’m not doing that for free, that’s going to cost you another thousand. Yeah, we’ll call you when we’re done, and you better have all the money when you come to pick up this chick. Hurry up, too, she’s starting to stink up the house.” He slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
Landon’s face reddened as his green eyes narrowed. “What? What did he say? Damn it, Lorne!”
The older brother continued to pace the length of the galley kitchen, shaking his head in time with the ticking clock on the kitchen wall. “Son of a bitch, man! I just don’t believe this!”
“Are we getting the money or not, Lorne?” Landon felt dizzy. The sweet aroma from the other room where the coffin lay nauseated him.
Lorne yanked open a drawer and fished around the utensils. “Where’s that big knife with the black handle?” he asked over the din of crashing forks and spoons.
“Sink.” Landon reached into the sink slowly, but his brother swiped the knife, nearly slicing his brother’s palm.
The blade was crusted with dried peanut butter, but Lorne did not bother to wipe it clean. “Let’s get this thing off.” With his free hand he tugged at the car cover until a corner of the coffin was exposed.
Landon remained frozen in the kitchen doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Seems our friend sprung an extra assignment on us,” Lorne grunted. The cover was halfway off the casket now. “Apparently he thinks this girl’s body is gonna be worth something once the Pope says she’s a saint, or ordains her a saint, or whatever the hell he does,” he mumbled. “Anyway, he wants us to send some people a souvenir to let them know she’s been taken and won’t be returned without a price.”
“A ransom, then?”
“Yes, and get your ass over here and help!”
Landon moved back to his chair and helped Lorne remove the cover. “So how much did he say he thought the body was worth?”
“Didn’t say. I imagine the Pope would pay anything to get her back.”
Landon’s mouth dropped. “This guy’s gonna try to get ransom money from the Pope?”
“That would be my guess. Ain’t he the one with all the money?”
“So she’s worth a lot, huh?” Landon asked.
“To somebody.”
“More than ten thousand dollars, you think?”
Lorne, who was studying the deteriorating seal on the casket, looked up to meet his brother’s eyes, and smiled.
Chapter Three
“Chuck, there’s only one kind of nut who’d steal a dead body,” remarked Deputy Dwayne Anderson to his partner as they unraveled a line of bright yellow crime tape around the short, iron-spiked fence of the Alger family plot. He glanced down at the disturbed grave that once housed Blessed Lorena Alger. In her place lay a lifeless body dressed in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. “I got bucks says one of those satanic cults did this. There was a full moon last night.”
“A satanic cult, in Ash Lake? Oh, come on!” cried Deputy Chuck Walters. “Sure, in Jacksonville you might see some weird stuff, but we’ve never had reports of anything like that here before. Not since I’ve been here, anyway. Why now, and why here, of all places?”
Dwayne shook his head and tugged on his end of the tape for more slack. “You’d think if a satanic cult was running around this area, they’d stay close to Jacksonville,” Chuck insisted. “They can get into more trouble there.”
He crooked his neck back to the married couple shivering in thin T-shirts and shorts near a fenced monument. Sheriff Lew Caperton, an imposing figure in full uniform, was interviewing them with regards to the emergency call they placed which alerted the police to the crime. “How do we know they didn’t do it?” Chuck whispered. “For all we know, they made the call to take the suspicion away from them.”
Dwayne rolled his eyes. “Right. Two tourists driving a Ford Focus from Tarpon Springs decide to stop in backwater Ash Lake, kill a cemetery maintenance man and steal a hundred-year-old coffin. No motive, nothing suspicious in their car. Yeah,” he drawled, “that makes perfect sense. Did you think they were going to strap the box to the roof of their car?”
“Makes more sense than a satanic cult,” Chuck mumbled. “What would a satanic cult do with a dead body, anyway?” As he said this, Chuck turned a pale shade of green. “You don’t think they’re going to eat it?”
Dwayne arched his stout frame and put a hand to the small of his back. Still holding his end of the tape, he wiped away a stream of sweat trickling down from the band of his hat into his bushy eyebrows. “C’mon, Chuck! Didn’t you ever watch The X-Files? They could—”
“Gentlemen! Still working hard, I see.”
Both men turned to see Lew approach from behind the large statue of Jesus that marked the Alger plot. He rested one Latex-covered hand on his hip while he lifted the other to wipe his mustache with his bare wrist. “If you two are finished here, perhaps you could postpone your conspiracy theory discussion to scan the perimeter for more evidence. The EMTs are here for the body.”
Lew cocked his head toward the gravel cemetery path, where two county employees in matching blue jumpsuits were wheeling a gurney and empty body bag toward the gravesite. In the distance one could easily make out the blinking red-orange strobes of the county ambulance parked in front of the gates.
The male tourist ushered his wife toward a palm tree and helped her to sit. Arlen Sanders eased his backpack next to her; the unmistakable sound of glass jars clinking inside filled the air between them and the sheriff. “I appreciate your calling to alert us to this,” Lew called over to them. “One of us will be back in a minute to ask you some more questions. I just need to take care of this.”
A visibly shaken Arlen raked a hand through his thinning red hair and flexed his knobby, freckled knees. His other hand toyed with a minuscule cellular phone. “Take your time. Brenda and I will help you in any way we can.”
Lew turned away from the couple, removed a tissue from his shirt pocket and mopped his forehead. “Take care of him,” he told the team as they lowered the gurney to ground level and studied the body half-buried in the grave. “Paul Dix went to my church, he was a good man. He certainly didn’t deserve this.”
He stepped out of their way, careful to avoid stepping on the few religious knickknacks visitors to Blessed Lorena’s grave often left behind after pilgrimages. Arlen and Brenda Sanders, to the contrary, had come to the cemetery to take a souvenir, so noted by the jar of dirt clutched in the woman’s frail hands. “Man, I am not looking forward to calling Miss Julie about this,” Lew mumbled under his breath just as Dwayne and Chuck returned, shaking their heads with downcast gazes.
“Well, whoever did this was smart enough not to leave any discernible footprints. They were all blurred at the site,” Chuck told him. “Of course, given the number of people who come by here, who knows what kind of shoes the guy was wearing.”
“Or guys,” Dwayne offered. “I doubt one man could’ve carried off that coffin by himself.”
“I don’t know,” said Chuck. “She’s just a girl. I can’t imagine her being too heavy.”
“Yes, Chuck, she’s a girl, but Dwayne has a point. One man can’t handle a coffin alone, and Lorena’s would h
ave to have been at least four feet long.” Lew stared down at his own feet, then over to the EMTs as they lifted the lifeless cemetery caretaker from the emptied grave. Scattered around them in the wake of the murder were a few rosaries, several wallet-sized snapshots of people, and various plastic saint statues. He grimaced as a gurney wheel rolled over and crunched a miniature plastic likeness of the Blessed Virgin.
“Oops. Think that’s gonna get ‘em thrown into the Lake of Fire?” Dwayne cracked.
“It’s just plastic, Dwayne,” Lew grunted. “Any Catholic will tell you that. Don’t worry about it.”
Dwayne snorted. “They certainly like to dress them up on occasions. Kissing statues and leavin’ presents... idol worship is all it is.”
Lew rolled his eyes. “This from a man whose entire house is decorated floor to ceiling with NASCAR collectibles,” he said aloud. “And didn’t your wife once dive into a rabid crowd at Regency Mall to get a Princess Diana Beanie Baby toy? How is that not idolatry?” He did not wait for a now red-faced Dwayne to answer, but instead stalked over to Arlen and Brenda Sanders to finish his interrogation.
“Thanks for waiting,” Lew told them as Arlen helped Brenda to her feet, “and thank you for being up front about how you came to discover the body.” He tried to sound light-hearted, but the frightened look on Mrs. Sanders’s face did not fade. “It’s not often people will readily admit to breaking and entering.”
Arlen shrugged. “We didn’t plan on doing any damage ourselves, we just wanted a dirt sample for our collection. We figured we’d be in and out and on our way to enjoy the rest of our vacation.”
Brenda rubbed her chubby, bare arms as a stiff breeze blew past them and rustled the palm fronds overhead. “Do you need the bobby pin we used to pick the lock? It’s in my purse.”
“That’s okay, but we will need you to come to the station so we can get your fingerprints. We’ll need them to eliminate what we find on the lock.”
“Yes, of course.” They watched transfixed as Paul Dix was lifted, zipped up and wheeled back down the path to the waiting ambulance, which was parked behind both cruisers alongside the curb. Across the street and around the small town square, Ash Lake was slowly coming to life. Lonnie’s French Bakery and Deli opened its doors for the early breakfast crowd while employees of surrounding shops adjusted sandwich boards and awnings. Curious faces had yet to line the iron fence and scan the stones for any hint of a gory aftermath that so entranced gawkers and encouraged cars to slow to a snail’s crawl. “I have a feeling if we don’t hurry this along we’ll get an audience,” Lew muttered to himself.
“You had the right thought, anyway, illegal though it was,” Lew added to Arlen as he glanced at his watch. It was not yet eight o’clock. “Ash Lake doesn’t usually get jumping until around nine. It will be nice to get as much work done on this case as possible before the public gets wind of it.”
“So, what happens to us, after we get fingerprinted?” Brenda asked nervously. “Are we under arrest?”
Lew’s grim smile did little to assure the couple. “It is difficult to ignore the B&E, but in light of what you found here I would be willing to overlook that.” Husband and wife visibly relaxed as the sheriff continued. “The next time you visit a cemetery, though, please do it during visiting hours. Oh, yes,” Lew extended his hand to collect the jelly jar from Brenda, “technically this dirt is part of the crime scene. I can’t let you take it, sorry.”
“It’s okay, hon. It’s not important right now.” Arlen coaxed his wife into surrendering the jar. “I just don’t get it,” he added to nobody in particular. “Why would somebody do a thing like this? Why would anybody want to steal Lorena Alger’s body, not to mention killing someone to get it?”
“There’s a lot of people in the world who just aren’t all there, Mr. Sanders,” Lew said. “Ash Lake isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, but on occasion you—”
Arlen and Brenda turned toward town, seeking whatever had caused the sheriff to suddenly pause in mid-sentence. In the distance a red Pontiac Firebird appeared from around the corner of the bank building and screeched to a halt behind Lew’s cruiser. The shapely, thirtyish woman who emerged from the car walked briskly first to the ambulance just as one of the EMTs slammed the back doors shut. Finding the young uniformed man unwilling to talk, the woman started inside the cemetery. Her black sport coat and long brown hair flapped in another, stronger gust of wind, and her black mules kicked up small clouds of dust.
“Chuck, keep an eye on these two,” Lew called over his shoulder as he jogged toward the cemetery entrance. He met Ronnie at the gate. “Ron, we haven’t secured the scene yet. You know better than—”
“Who was that being shoved into the ambulance? Did somebody get hurt? Mugged?” Ronnie demanded. “They wouldn’t let me look. What the hell’s going on here?” Not waiting for Lew to answer, she wriggled free of his grasp and pushed deeper into the cemetery, brushing past the astonished married couple from Tarpon Springs and both deputies.
“Ron!” Lew shouted after her. “You have no right—”
“I have every right, Lew! My family owns this plot, and somebody called the school this morning to say it may have been disturbed. I’m not leaving until I find out—”
The words died in her throat as Ronnie rounded the mold-stained monument to Lorena’s open grave. By then everyone in the area had come running.
For the second time that morning, a blood-curdling scream pierced the air of Ash Lake Cemetery.
Chapter Four
“You alright now, Ron?”
Ronnie fixed her gaze on the specials chalkboard propped on an easel on the counter of the French Bakery and Deli. She traced with her eyes Loni Humphrey’s hot pink cursive handwriting, which advertised the morning special of lemon cream croissants and homemade glazed crullers. Her hands curled around a warm mug of coffee, and she relished the sensation that crept up her arms. As badly as she needed the boost, though, she refused to drink. Loni’s coffee could remove paint, and Ronnie was not feeling particularly daring.
The shock of the morning’s discovery, she noticed, did little to sour Lew’s appetite. The two said little when Lew escorted her inside to calm her nerves, and only after he put away a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage did he even look up at her to speak.
“So, what tipped you off?”
“Hm?”
“I didn’t have anybody call you. I was going to wait until we had the crime scene secured.” Lew dabbed at his mustache with a paper napkin. “Even then, I probably would have contacted your grandmother first, since the plot’s in her name.”
“Yeah,” Ronnie mouthed slowly, her lips numb. Outside strobe lights twirled in the distance at the gates of the cemetery as Officers Anderson and Walters escorted the two nervous tourists into the back seat of one cruiser.
“What are you going to do with them? They alerted you to the crime. You’re going to arrest them for that?”
“I need their fingerprints to eliminate them from the lock. Besides, they broke into the cemetery, and that’s a crime in itself,” Lew stated plainly. “As much as I appreciate what they did for us, I’m not sure I can ignore that.”
Ronnie found her voice again. “Oh, come on, Lew! Think about it for a second: Lorena’s gone, right? Somebody had to have taken her in the night. I’m sure you checked their car and didn’t find her. She’d be hard to miss in a shoe box like that.”
“This is true. It would appear somebody else is the culprit.” Lew signaled Loni for a refill on coffee. “However, we still have business to finish with Mr. and Mrs. Sanders.”
“Probably some teenagers who did it as a prank,” Ronnie grumbled. Hadn’t there been a special on television the other night about the movement of Goth teenagers, she thought. Kids who sulked in their bedrooms and pored over Anne Rice novels? Did Ash Hill have any kids like that? “Anyway, you should concentrate more on finding Lorena and Mr. Dix’s killer than badgering some poor couple.”
; Lew drummed his fingers on the table. A short influx of new customers prevented Loni from attending to his coffee needs. “Like I said, we’ll have to get their fingerprints in case our perps did handle the lock. Don’t know why the Sanderses couldn’t have just come by during regular hours.”
“It still would have been locked, Lew. Paul Dix opened the gates every morning, right?”
“Right,” Lew sighed. He leaned over the table and looked straight at Ronnie. “You didn’t answer my question. Who tipped you off?”
“Huh?” Ronnie shifted her attention back to Lew and away from the cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and salads stuffed inside the dairy case. He looked tired—his normally soft brown eyes were bloodshot and drooping, and as his lips parted she spied a dark fleck of tobacco lodged between two of his bottom teeth. Her heart sank; Lew was dipping again. She and Jim had appealed to him for years to get him to quit, even going so far as to fill his desk at work with sunflower seeds and bubble gum. Lew chewed when he was feeling particularly stressed.
Mystery Bundle (Saints Preserve Us, Pray For Us Sinners, Murder Most Trivial) Page 3