The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant?” Lucille Schuster stood abruptly. She toyed with a pendant.

  They were the only two in the all-purpose room. Suggs, Carella, Peters, Moody, they’d watched half-heartedly the first time through, then one by one slipped out.

  “Are you finished with me yet?” Schuster asked petulantly. Her confidence was growing. Color was restored to her face. “I’ve answered all your questions. And not counting the first time I came down to watch the video with you, this is the third time we’ve been through it. There’s absolutely nothing else I can tell you and I have classes to teach this afternoon.”

  “I’d be finished with you if I thought you were trying,” Claudia said curtly. “But I don’t, so I’m going to keep asking you questions and we’re going to watch this video another dozen times if we have to.”

  Lucille Schuster sighed elaborately. “Then may I please use the ladies room?”

  Claudia waved disgustedly. The party was the key. Had to be. And Schuster was holding something back. Maybe just a little. Maybe quite a lot.

  While the teacher was gone, Claudia sought Moody. “Mitch, wasn’t it you who checked into Schuster’s husband’s alibi the night of Overton’s murder?”

  Midway through pouring fresh coffee for himself, Moody paused. “Yeah. He sells pharmaceuticals and was at a seminar in Dallas. He didn’t get in until the next morning. He was there. I got half a dozen people corroborating his presence.”

  Claudia nodded thoughtfully, watching Moody doctor his coffee with a sweetener. “Okay, but what about his flights? Did he come in non-stop? Change planes? Does everything check out?”

  Moody shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I—”

  “Trace them, Mitch. His presence doesn’t mean a damn thing if his travel itinerary doesn’t check out.”

  Damn it! Another hole she could drive an eighteen-wheeler through, and it was her fault. The potholes were everywhere; she should have anticipated most.

  “I’ll get right on it,” Moody mumbled. He hurried off.

  Claudia filled her own coffee cup and returned to the all-purpose room. She settled irritably into her chair and jabbed the forward button on the VCR. Okay. She knew she was obsessing at this point. But she was obsessing because she knew she was missing something.

  Shit. What?

  And then, at precisely the point when the film began to roll once more, Claudia saw it. She’d been watching the forest and missing the trees. Suggs had been right about that much.

  There, almost at the point where the Reverend Donna Overton was saying her goodbyes—a script Claudia had committed to memory word for word—the background chatter that she’d glossed over began to stand out. Someone off camera, a man, judging by the voice, was grousing about ice. They were running out.

  Claudia pushed the fast-forward button. The tape ran almost to the end before she stopped it, then backed it up marginally.

  The party was winding down, and the drunker he’d become, the more hideous Tom Orben’s camera aim had been. The man was practically careening off walls and the images he shot bounced like gravel off a dump truck. But one shot showed clearly. It was a nothing shot, one of a hundred random details: A hand with tongs plucking an ice cube from a filled plastic bucket.

  Claudia shot out of her seat. When she flung the door to the ladies room open, Lucille Schuster was applying fresh lipstick. The two women exchanged the briefest of glances in the mirror before Claudia slammed the door behind her. She closed on the woman swiftly.

  “You sanctimonious, lying bitch!” she snapped. “Someone went for ice shortly after Donna Overton left your party. Now I want to know who went!”

  Schuster warbled. She put a hand to her throat and said, “No, there’s got to be a mistake. I . . . are you sure? I mean . . . I don’t remember. There were so many things going on. I’m not sure—”

  Claudia turned lethal eyes on the woman. She banged the metal towel holder on the wall an inch to the right of the Schuster’s face. The clatter ricocheted like gunfire. Lucille Schuster gasped and tried to put a hand up to shield her face. Claudia batted it away. Schuster’s lipstick skittered into the sink.

  “You’d better start telling me what I want to know,” Claudia said. “You played your good hostess role to the hilt. You stayed sober—you were the only one to stay sober. So don’t tell me you don’t know who went for ice.”

  Schuster looked wildly around. “You don’t understand,” she blurted. Tears fell freely. “They’ll fire me if this party gets out! I wish I’d never had it! And this person who went, if you knew him at all you’d know he never could’ve—”

  Riding anger, Claudia pressed in close enough to count the pores on Lucille Schuster’s face. The teacher wore Obsession perfume. “Five seconds,” she said, her voice steady and low. “That’s all you have to start talking. Five seconds. One. Two—don’t even imagine I’ll let you out of here before I get what I want—three. Four . . . .”

  Pinioned so closely, Schuster had nowhere to look but Claudia’s face. The detective’s unwavering eyes dispensed fury made all the more impressive through her lenses.

  Lucille Schuster flinched on the count of three. On the count of four she whimpered pathetically. But there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but tell, and so she did on the count of five.

  Claudia fished the lipstick from the sink. She handed it to Lucille Schuster without another word, gave her a long look, and left her crying against the bathroom wall.

  Chapter 28

  “Zorro’s our man? Zorro? The guy with the black cape and the sword?” Carella’s chair scraped against the linoleum as he sat. “I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “I never would’ve thunk it.”

  Claudia tilted her head in acknowledgement, waiting for everyone to get settled. Although Lucille Schuster had slunk off hours earlier, she’d held Victor Flynn’s name to herself until she had time to make a few cursory checks. To be sure.

  Now, it was five o’clock. Mitch Moody had arrived with two six-packs and a pizza. His dark hair was slicked back, still wet from a hurried shower.

  “Okay, Hershey, it’s your show,” Suggs said. He wrestled with the flaps on the pizza box and pulled out a steaming piece. “You’ve told us who the star is. Now read us the script. And tell me why this teacher gets the Academy Award because if we’re wrong again, I’m gonna be hung by my balls.”

  As patiently as possible, Claudia laid it out. When Donna Overton left the Halloween party, Victor Flynn good-naturedly offered to make an ice run. He arrived at the 7-Eleven within moments of the medium. She bought cigarettes. He purchased an eight-pound bag of ice.

  Then he followed her home, perhaps lingering outside in his car for a few minutes, thinking, maybe even struggling to resist. But he couldn’t. Overton had set him off at the party, said something that unleashed a murderous rage suppressed long ago. The urge built to a pressure point until killing her was the only way to release it.

  “Would’ve been simpler to just off himself,” Suggs muttered. He poked a string of cheese into his mouth. “The son of a bitch is gonna wish he had when we haul him in.”

  “So then what?” asked Moody. “She just let him in?”

  “I think that’s exactly what happened,” said Claudia. “She would have recognized him as a guest from the party. She would’ve been confused to see him there, but probably not alarmed. Maybe she thought she’d forgotten something and that he was bringing it by.”

  “Sounds like a lot of conjecture,” said Suggs.

  “It is,” said Claudia, “and so’s the rest, but I think we have a shot at it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m all ears.”

  “They wound up in the kitchen,” Claudia continued, seeing it play out in her mind. “Either he came at her right away and chased her there, or for some reason she led him there, maybe being the good hostess, being polite, offering him something to drink.”

  The scent of pepperoni fouled the air, contributing to the spiraling headache Cl
audia had been unsuccessful in banishing with aspirin.

  “We know he killed her there,” Claudia said softly. “It probably didn’t take very long. It—”

  “I don’t suppose you know what he iced her with,” Suggs interrupted.

  Claudia smiled wryly at the chief’s unintentional pun. “She was killed with the bag of ice he’d just bought at the 7-Eleven. Bludgeoned to death by eight pounds of ice intended for drinks at the party. It would’ve been like swinging a concrete block at her.”

  Hot cheese plopped to the table beside the chief’s elbow. “You’re yankin’ my chain,” he said. “You gotta be.”

  “No.” Claudia fired up a cigarette, then pulled papers from the Overton file. “This is the inventory report from the crime lab, some of the stuff they bagged at the scene. One of the items listed is a heavy staple. It was found on Overton’s kitchen counter. This afternoon, I compared it to the staples used on the necks of the ice bags at the 7-Eleven. We’ll need it authenticated by the lab, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to find a match.”

  “The staple broke off the bag while he was whacking her?” Peters asked.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Claudia shuffled through the file, produced another report. “The report said that some of the blood on the floor had been diluted with water. We figured it came from a glass we’d found on the floor, the assumption being that she’d gotten a drink from the tap and during the beating it spilled onto the floor.”

  “So you’re sayin’ that between the time Flynn killed her and we went in, the ice had melted, diluting the blood,” said Suggs.

  “That’s how I see it,” said Claudia. “The lab dusted the glass for prints—Overton’s were on it—but they didn’t run an analysis of residue in the glass itself. We’ll get them to do that now. But I bet they’ll find traces of Diet Coke. It was Overton’s drink of choice.”

  Claudia guided them through the rest. After Overton was dead, Flynn returned to the party, stopping at the 7-Eleven for another bag of ice. Most of the guests had been drinking like fish; they had no perception of how long Flynn had been gone. They didn’t notice how withdrawn he appeared afterward. They didn’t notice that the Zorro hat and jacket were gone. They didn’t notice that he wasn’t wearing his glasses—thick, black- framed spectacles.

  Claudia opened a labeled evidence bag. She shook it gingerly. A small screw fell out.

  “Take a look at this,” Claudia said, carefully holding up the screw between the forefinger and thumb of her right hand. “The crime techs swept it out in a piece of dust trapped between the counter and the refrigerator in Overton’s kitchen.”

  Suggs edged in closer to the table to squint at the tiny piece.

  “Now watch,” said Claudia. She took her glasses off with her left hand, holding the eyewear beside the screw. “Look at the stem on the frame of my glasses,” she said. “See how it’s hinged to the eye piece with a screw?”

  When she was satisfied all of them had a good look, Claudia put her glasses back on. “The screw we found in Overton’s kitchen wouldn’t fit my glasses, but it’s a close match. And I bet it’s a perfect match for the glasses Flynn wore to the party.”

  Carella whistled.

  “In the first part of the video, Flynn wears glasses. He has them on through the time that Overton leaves.” Claudia put the screw back in the evidence bag. “Later in the video, long after Overton is gone and Flynn’s returned with ice, he’s not wearing glasses at all.”

  “Knocked off, bumped off, something, when he was beating Overton to death,” said Peters.

  Claudia nodded. Then she told them how she’d met Flynn two days after the murder, called in because he was concerned with Robin’s faltering grade.

  “That much was true,” said Claudia. “The kid’s grade had just about dropped off the edge of the earth. But that’s not why Flynn called me. He called me to fish, to see if he could learn anything about what we’d found. It’s a small town and Robin’s one of his students. For that matter, probably every kid who marches through eighth-grade algebra is.

  “Anyway, my name was in all the TV, radio, and newspaper reports as lead investigator in the murder. He didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to arrange to meet me without calling suspicion to himself.”

  “So the guy’s a nut case, but he ain’t stupid,” Suggs grumbled.

  “No, he’s not stupid.” Claudia shook her head, calling up Flynn’s face. “Weird, though. He has a lot of nervous habits,” she said, “and one of the things he kept doing was fooling with his glasses, like they were too tight. And they were, because they were new, a replacement pair.”

  Claudia watched the information register in the faces around her. “The so-called ‘R’coon’ eyes that little J.J. Dillard saw in the ‘monster’ at his grandparents, those would’ve been Flynn’s new glasses,” she said. “Just like the old ones—thick-framed, black, heavy.”

  “We’re gonna have to check with retail optometry shops all over Flagg County, maybe beyond,” Suggs murmured. “There’s a couple places you can get new glasses made up in an hour.”

  “Let’s hope our whacko didn’t drive to Kansas to get them,” said Carella. He swallowed noisily, and took a swig of beer. “And let’s hope someone can ID our man.”

  With a sardonic chuckle, Claudia said, “Even if he used an assumed name, anyone who fitted Flynn for glasses will remember him. His breath is enough to level Milwaukee.”

  “Maybe,” said Carella, “but luck’s been in his favor all the way.”

  “Not any more,” Claudia said. “It’s turning our way now. Overton was spur of the moment. Not random, but almost instinctive. We should’ve been able to plow through the holes he left us, but we didn’t see them because we were looking for something else.”

  “Something that made sense,” Peters said.

  “Standard motives—money, sex, drugs, like that,” said Moody.

  “Like that,” Claudia repeated wearily. She thought again about everything they’d missed—she’d missed. Had it still been Cleveland, would she have approached the case differently? Looked harder at the video from the beginning? Even remotely considered the teacher?

  Victor Flynn: The Casper Milquetoast of mathematics.

  Victor Flynn: The avenger, personified as Zorro.

  Victor Flynn: The quirky customer at the 7-Eleven, with buffalo breath.

  Victor Flynn: A murdering bastard with four deaths to his credit.

  Appetites sated, the quintet of cops around the pizza box stared unseeingly at the debris. Claudia felt queasy now, nausea competing with the headache. God, was she tired.

  “So Hershey,” said Suggs at length. “What’s your read on this guy? Why the mediums? Why the fingers?”

  Sighing, Claudia said, “I’m not sure. When you watch the part on the video where Overton does her thing, you’ll see that Flynn reacts visibly when she points at him. But so did a lot of the guests. The only difference is that he doesn’t seem to come out of it later.”

  The chief leaned back in his chair and patted his belly. “Looks to me like we have enough to go round this guy up right now.”

  “No, not yet.” Claudia shuffled through notes she’d prepared earlier. “What we have right now is circumstantial. Good stuff, but it all needs verification.” She nodded toward Peters. “Grab a pen, Sarge. Here’s what needs doing.”

  Over the next half hour, Claudia laid it out. The staple and precision screw had to be run down. They needed to learn whether Flynn had recently purchased new glasses. The Zorro costume may have been a rental: From where? Was it returned? In what condition? Blood stains?

  Stills of Flynn from the video had to be obtained. Possibly, close-ups on his face would show the glasses he originally wore were old. And his face, they would need an ID from Mark Yastrepsky and Eddie Winn. The pair had driven to Indiana; had to be tracked down for a signed statement.

  The video also showed a variety of places where Flynn had stood in Lucille Schuster’
s house. Crime techs needed to look for traces of pumpkin on the carpeting, traces Flynn might have tracked in from the smashed jack o’lantern at Overton’s.

  “Whew,” said Carella. “Schuster may not cooperate. And it’s a long shot.”

  “Very,” Claudia acknowledged. “But it could help us put him at the scene of the murder and we have to take it. As for Schuster, she’ll cooperate.”

  Suggs barked a laugh. “She looked a little rattled when she left here earlier today. Give her a talkin’ to, did you?”

  “We talked,” Claudia said non-committally. “Look, there’s more. Obviously, Flynn needs to be put under around-the-clock surveillance.” Claudia nodded toward Peters. “Get your best people out there in plainclothes and unmarked cars—their own if necessary.” She raised an eyebrow. “No new puppies this time, Ron.”

  Peters murmured acknowledgment.

  “We also need a history on Flynn, and fast,” said Claudia. “He doesn’t whack people because an algebra problem keeps him up at night. There’s something in his background that provokes his rage. I’ll take care of that myself.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Carella, “all of this is going to take a lot of time.”

  “It can’t take a lot of time,” Claudia said quickly. “We need to move, and move quickly—two, three days, tops. Call in favors, push, whatever you have to do. And for God’s sake, this has to be kept quiet. If there’s a leak, he’ll run—or worse. He’s probably already fidgety because of the announcement that we’ve eliminated Markos as a suspect.”

  “He’s no lightweight, is he?” Peters said softly.

  “No, and that’s another thing,” said Claudia. She looked sharply at each man in turn, holding Suggs’ eyes the longest. “That man teaches my daughter, and he tutors her after school. For that matter, he’s in contact with a lot of kids. He’d better not be able to take a leak without us knowing it. And I want a discreet drive-by at my house at regular intervals every night until we pick him up.”