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

by Laura Belgrave

  “Hershey,” Suggs said softly, “I understand how you feel, but this boy’s not after kids, he’s—”

  “I don’t care who he’s targeting!” said Claudia. “If anyone underestimates Flynn and my kid—anyone’s kid, anybody period—gets hurt, I promise you there will be hell to pay.” A vision of Robin laughing, joking, flickered through Claudia’s mind. “Don’t anybody fight me on this point. Goddamn it, I mean it.”

  Suggs nodded slowly. “Okay, Hershey, okay. We’ll be on him like white on rice.”

  They split up tasks, then watched the video one more time.

  “That film is like a road map if you know how to read it,” said Moody afterward. They were breaking up, getting ready to pump the phones, hit the streets, maybe work in a little sleep. “Flynn’s signature is all over it.”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t find his John Hancock anywhere else,” Suggs said.

  Chapter 29

  Hershey knew. He could tell it by the way Lucille Schuster looked at him, or rather, refused to look at him. None of the usual hallway chatter, the casual touch on his wrist. The woman didn’t even pause, just swept right past him, head low, eyes averted. Not even hello Victor.

  And he should have guessed as much. Through the window of his classroom, he had seen her escorted down the hall by Hershey, a skyscraper on legs. Lucille’s posture signaled uneasiness, but he’d turned it aside. The cops were after Markos, after all. And the detective, she was back to vandalisms, petty burglaries, routine matters. It wasn’t commonplace for a police officer to appear in the school, but neither was it cause for alarm.

  No, best to stay cool, and so for hours he’d waited, teaching by rote, looking for the familiarity in greeting with Lucille’s return. When it didn’t come, he knew. And even if he ignored the signals, he couldn’t ignore what he heard on the radio when he got home: Markos was in custody, but no longer a suspect in the murders. Victor Flynn paced, fighting panic. He snapped off the radio, clamped his hands over his ears.

  Hershey. He didn’t know how. But he knew it was she who had turned all eyes to him. The others were merely followers.

  They would come for him soon. A day, maybe two or three. But they would come, and with the enormity of that knowledge Victor began to whimper. Tears stained the bottoms of his lenses, blurring his vision. His body shook. He got on his hands and knees, and pounded the floor, and wailed.

  It was all over, and when they had him they would want him to die. It wasn’t fair.

  For a long time, Victor sobbed. Dark fell, inviting shadow, but still he lay until exhaustion alone dried his tears. He didn’t rise, though; there was no reason. Instead, he measured time with each breath that he felt on his arm, curled under his head. Let them come, then.

  But then he heard the voice, the voice he had stopped so many times, so finally.

  What? Wait a minute. What was she saying?

  Victor pushed himself to a knee. He peered into the shadows, listening. She was asking him something, her voice scornful: Didn’t he know that he could never be rid of her? That it wasn’t meant to be?

  Fool! They were part of each other and no matter what he did, no matter how often he tried, she would always be there with him, and now, not because he deserved it but because he had no one else, she would be there for him, too.

  Get up, she told him firmly. Stand like a man.

  “Mother?” Victor said plaintively. He rose, trembling. “They’re going to come for me. That woman, she knows, she—”

  The voice spat contempt. The detective could be stopped, and when she was, the others would stop coming, too. Take stock of your situation, the voice ordered. Think of who you are. How far you’ve come. The woman is nothing beside you. Beside me.

  Victor nodded. Yes. He was beginning to see. It had been a mistake, trying to make his mother go away. He was nothing without her. All she had ever done was help him. Like she was helping him now.

  In a voice barely above a whisper, Victor asked for instructions. And as she had always done, she told him what to do. She told him how to do it.

  There was a way.

  Chapter 30

  It was nearly midnight when Claudia’s plane touched down. With a wind chill factor of 20, the temperature stood at a bone-numbing 12 degrees. An earlier snow turned to dirty crust hampered movement, and by the time Claudia collected her overnight bag, signed for the rental car, and checked into her room at the Holiday Inn, it was after one o’clock in the morning.

  While she rummaged for her toothbrush, Claudia toyed with the idea of calling Robin. It was the Thanksgiving holiday and she felt entitled to a little sympathy. Sustaining resentment took work and in off-guard moments Robin seemed unable to keep it up.

  Claudia turned on the bathroom tap. Florida faucets never truly released cold water, but what gushed from the Minnesota tap made her teeth ache. Working briskly around her back teeth, Claudia thought she could coax Robin into a giggle with little more than a slapstick snow story. Embellish it a little, but keep it short.

  Claudia spit into the sink and set the toothbrush beside her deodorant. She wiped her mouth on a hand towel and turned off the bathroom light. Yup. Robin would thrill at the image of her mother slip-sliding from car to door. But the resolve that pointed her toward the phone wavered the moment she lifted the receiver. Claudia sighed and set it back down. No, better not. It would be after two in Florida. Robin needed her sleep and for that matter, so did Marty, who had agreed to spend the night.

  Although Claudia carefully avoided the word “babysitter,” Robin vigorously protested the notion of anyone staying with her—until Claudia said that Marty wanted to, thought it would be fun. Ah. It was Marty. That made it different.

  The truth be told, Claudia had few options. No way was she about to let Robin stay alone overnight, even without the menace of Victor Flynn. No way. The kid was thirteen, for God’s sake, just in that stage where she experimented with make-up but still watched a cartoon or two if she thought no one was looking. And unfortunately, Marty was the only woman with whom Claudia had become even marginally friendly, and she wasn’t about to unload the kid on anyone she worked with. And Dennis—well, propriety said no.

  Shivering, Claudia kicked off her shoes. The damned hotel rooms either roasted you in the summer or froze you in the winter, no matter where you were. And this was the down side of November in Minnesota, a no-nonsense state where cold sadistically lingered into spring.

  After setting her travel alarm, Claudia lay beneath the blanket and tried to argue herself to sleep. It was Thursday—well, Friday, by now. If her meeting at nine went well, she was prepared to take Flynn by Monday, maybe sooner. Moody was still tracking Flynn’s glasses, but over the last two days the rest of the pieces had come together and Claudia was confident that would as well.

  So screw you, Flynn. An air-tight case was on its way to the state attorney. The press would shut up. The psychics and mediums would stop calling. You will kill no more.

  As she twitched toward sleep, it struck Claudia that it was altogether fitting that Flynn’s roots would be in one of the nation’s most relentlessly cold states, and that he would mark his first murder with a bag of ice.

  Victor Ronald Flynn, now thirty-four, was born and raised in a rural, lake community due north of Duluth. Winds howling off Lake Superior commonly dropped temperatures to freezing nearly two hundred days of every year. The region rarely sustained ninety-degree ranges more than two or three days annually.

  While she pumped the gas pedal to spark life in the car, the thought spun fresh shivers along Claudia’s spine. Cleveland certainly scored high in cold, but she had been away from it just long enough for her blood to thin. She wondered whether Flynn’s had.

  Working backward from his current status as a teacher at the junior high, Claudia had spent two frustrating days collecting data on Flynn, an exhausting process that showed him as something of an enigma. For despite his insipid expression and wooden demeanor in the classroo
m, Flynn was not as soft as his stature suggested. When they took him, they would have to exercise more caution than anticipated.

  Claudia’s spotty information showed that before teaching he worked an assortment of jobs as a laborer. There were stints at a cannery, a dairy farm, then later at Lake Superior’s loading docks. Before he drifted into teaching—another curiosity—he was employed as a wilderness guide in a remote Wisconsin wildlife park. The job didn’t last long; Victor’s stiff personality made paying customers uncomfortable.

  But then there was a gap. As if he didn’t exist at all, the trail stopped abruptly for a four-year period between Victor Flynn’s departure from cold country to less taxing climates in the southeast. And of his childhood, Claudia knew almost nothing, though it was the very little she had learned that brought her now to Minnesota.

  The engine wheezed once, twice, then turned over. Claudia sighed and angled out of the parking spot. Fresh snow was beginning to fall. She hoped her meeting would not take long; with luck, she might be able to get an early flight back. It would be at least sixty degrees in Indian Run.

  Even with the snow, Claudia made good time by staying on primary roads as much as possible. It was five to nine when she pulled up in front the retired psychologist’s home, an impressive cabin nestled in a copse of trees.

  Franklin D. Washington met Claudia at the door. They sized each other up briefly while exchanging introductions, and then Washington ushered Claudia to the den.

  The former counselor, a portly seventy-one-year-old black man whose wiry hair had gone to white, gestured to an overstuffed chair. He prodded a newly started fire in a brick-laid fireplace. It hissed and spat, radiating warmth in a circuit that embraced Claudia’s chair.

  During the requisite small talk, Washington laced his hands across an ample belly. He wore soft corduroy slacks and a green-and-white flannel shirt. Were it not for his dark eyes, steady and bright with intelligence, he might have been mistaken for a retired butcher, or perhaps farmer. But stripped of twenty pounds and buttoned into a suit, Claudia imagined him an impressive figure to the countless youths who had found themselves before his desk over the course of a thirty-five-year career associated with the courts. She wondered how well they responded to him.

  “Well, Detective,” Washington began, “you’ve come a long distance to see me, and not because you’re interested in comparing notes on the weather patterns here and in Florida.” He smiled indulgently. “Although you were rather cryptic by phone, you’re obviously here to learn what you can about Victor Flynn.”

  Claudia found herself addressing Washington as “sir” while she explained what gave Flynn status as the primary suspect in four slayings. She told him what meager information she had acquired on Flynn through Social Security records, telephone calls to former employers, colleagues, and acquaintances, and she showed him photographs of Flynn made from the video.

  Throughout, Washington said nothing. His face remained impassive when he looked at the pictures.

  “What’s interesting is that he has no criminal record,” said Claudia. “In fact, we haven’t been able to turn up as much as a parking ticket on him. The only evidence that there may have been trouble in his past is here, in Minnesota.”

  “I see. And because you’ve learned that the courts referred him to me for counseling, you want to know what that trouble was,” said Washington matter-of-factly.

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “The problem, of course, is that anything Victor Flynn may have told me is privileged information.”

  Claudia nodded.

  “Nevertheless, you would like me to tiptoe around professional ethics and tell you what law prohibits me from revealing.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe there might be vital information that would help me,” said Claudia. She tried to choose words as carefully as Washington did. “There are gaps in Victor Flynn’s background. It’s my belief that you know something about them.”

  “Well, Lieutenant, what have you already learned about your man?” asked Washington. He clipped the end off a cigar and lit up.

  “Victor Flynn came to Florida a little over a year ago and began teaching in Indian Run,” said Claudia. “Prior to that he taught in rural communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—always in places where he had identified a teacher shortage, places where background checks were cursory at best. He never stayed long.”

  “Does that make him less of a teacher?” Washington asked softly.

  “No, sir,” said Claudia. “By all accounts, he did his job adequately.”

  “So?”

  “So he never graduated from any college or university, at least not that we can find record of,” Claudia said. “We’re still chasing public school records and running down a list of private schools, and—”

  “On that I can save you some time, Lieutenant,” said Washington. “Victor Flynn never even graduated from high school. He never attended high school at all—or any school here. Until his mother’s death when he was sixteen, Victor was taught by her at home. I would imagine that anything he learned after that was self-taught.”

  At Claudia’s expression, Washington shrugged. “That isn’t privileged information. You would find that out for yourself given enough time.”

  “Sir, time is exactly what I don’t have,” said Claudia. She recognized impatience in her tone and spoke more slowly to curb it. “I have no authority here, and even if I did, public offices are closed until Monday. I can’t wait that long.”

  Obviously, Washington knew a good deal about Flynn. His stubborn refusal to yield information would have been admirable under other circumstances, but not now.

  “I need your help,” Claudia continued. “I don’t need to look at transcripts or records. I just need to know the gist of them—why he was referred to you.”

  Washington puffed silently. His eyes never strayed from Claudia’s face. At length, he carefully placed his cigar in an ashtray, got up, and disappeared into another room. When he returned, he handed Claudia a small, yellowing newspaper clip.

  “Read that, Lieutenant,” he said. “Perhaps it will suggest questions to you that I would feel comfortable in answering.”

  The faded clip was an obituary for Frieda Ostermann Flynn, dead at the age of forty-two. Claudia glanced up once, then read on. Frieda was identified as a seamstress. Survivors showed only Victor, sixteen then. There was no mention of a husband, and Frieda had been buried at county expense. Cause of death was not provided.

  “Presumably, Ostermann was Frieda’s maiden name,” said Claudia.

  Washington waved a hand. “One might draw that conclusion,” he said.

  “Reading between the lines, it could also be inferred that Flynn—Frieda’s husband, Victor’s father—was not a major part of her life. He might even have been a fly-by-night acquaintance, good only in name.”

  “Reasonable speculation given that no husband—late or otherwise—is listed as a survivor,” said Washington.

  Claudia glanced at the brief account again. “Also, presumably, Frieda Ostermann Flynn barely subsisted on her income as a seamstress,” she said. “No government body readily parts with money, for burial or otherwise. Victor and his mother struggled to make ends meet.”

  After pausing to relight his cigar, Washington inclined his head.

  “Forty-two is young to die, but the obituary doesn’t show any cause of death,” said Claudia. “Except at the family’s request or under circumstances that might be regarded as embarrassing, newspapers generally print that information.”

  “I’m not well-acquainted with newspaper procedures concerning obituaries—and I hope I’m not for a good long while—but yes,” said Washington, “that stands to reason.”

  Claudia sighed. “Mr. Washington—sir—please. I know you’re uncomfortable with this discussion, but if you know how Victor Flynn’s mother died, don’t make me guess. Tell me. I can try and research records to find out, but I abs
olutely don’t have time. I won’t press you for details on your sessions with Flynn because it would bring me nowhere. But his mother’s death—it’s relevant, isn’t it?”

  Rising, Washington moved to the fireplace. He bent to stoke the fire. Without turning, he said, “It took nearly two weeks to establish her identity at all. To begin with, she had been dead for at least a week when her body was discovered.”

  Claudia’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Back then, of course,” Washington continued, “forensic science was far inferior to that which is available today.”

  “Mr. Washington, please—how did she die?”

  Moving slowly, as if plagued by arthritis, Washington returned to his chair. “She was found by a school boy in a wooded area adjoining her property, less than two hundred yards from her house.” The psychologist’s eyes locked onto Claudia’s. “Her face was virtually gone. The rest of her was remarkably intact, not accounting for what the natural elements had done to her.”

  “He killed her, didn’t he?” Claudia asked softly.

  Washington said nothing at first. Then, “There was an investigation, of course. Naturally, it wasn’t as exhaustive as it might have been had the victim been wealthy or powerful. Ultimately, no one was ever charged.” Shadows from the fire danced across Washington’s face. “The courts, meanwhile, followed the book and referred the boy to me for counseling. It was assumed that the traumatic nature of his mother’s death might be troublesome for him to deal with. We’re talking about a sixteen-year-old boy with no other family.”

  Excited, Claudia said, “How did he strike you? Was Flynn remorseful? Traumatized? And in discussion with him, did he ever confide—”

  Washington held a cautionary hand up. He shook his head, not unkindly. “You’re stepping over that line, I’m afraid.”