“His car must’ve been on just the other side of the trailer because I didn’t see it. But I sure as hell heard it when he took off. I don’t know what it was. I can only tell you it didn’t sound like a truck, because trucks I know almost like I know dogs.”
He refused to concede that the shadowy figure might have been a woman because the person was tall and, he insisted, “No way would a woman get away from one of my dogs.” Claudia refrained from commenting.
Peters toyed with his empty cup. “You know how they do that, don’t you, how they make dogs go silent?”
Claudia shook her head.
“There’s surgery that a handful of veterinarians do for situations like when someone’s maybe threatened with eviction if they can’t get their dog to shut up. Obviously Raynor’s got a different motive.”
“Yeah. Like intimidation.”
“But there’s a bright spot in all this, right? The lab ought to be able to give us a fix on the pocket.”
“I don’t know, Ron. It’s off to the FBI and theoretically, yeah, they’ll be able to match the pocket to the manufacturer and maybe even give us a brand name. But that could take up to ten days and without fibers to match, I’m not sure what good any of it will do, at least in the short term. If Raynor’s dog had taken some blood with the pocket we’d get some DNA, but even with that it’d only support a conviction, which—”
“—we’ll never get if we don’t get a fix on a suspect first.”
“You got it.”
“So all we know so far is that someone besides Raynor had a reason to want Wanda Farr dead.”
Nothing in Peters’s tone hinted at an accusation, but the reality of his words overwhelmed Claudia with defeat. If Suggs had been there and offered her half a week’s severance pay to slink back to Cleveland, she would probably take it.
“The Becker case, at least that sounds promising.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Becker? It’s got to be Kensington and maybe her Aaron Rivens. Probably Rivens. Like you said, they knew each other before and you saw first-hand that they’re lovers now. That can’t be a coincidence.”
He was right. Their history didn’t lie.
Peters shrugged. “The way I see it is they played a major head game on Mrs. Becker. The woman’s distressed over her husband’s diagnosis, she’s fearful of the future, she’s not sure how she’s going to keep her own sanity together while she watches him lose his. Kensington—and then Rivens a little later—they buddy up to her, get her confidence. They’re like these scam artists who prey on old people’s fears and persuade them to pay for new roofs or buy a whole new air conditioner, only Kensington and Rivens were a lot more sophisticated and they had higher stakes.”
“Sophisticated” wasn’t the word that sprang to Claudia’s mind, but he had a point.
“All they had to do was wait for an opportunity,” Peters said. “When it came, they drowned the old guy in the pool then chucked his body into the No-Name. He had Alzheimer’s and a pattern of wandering, so what they put together was a convenient tragedy. And Kensington, what with her history of targeting old guys, she had to be the brains behind this. She—wow, someone just rolled a strike.”
An exultant whoop from the lanes sailed into the bar. Claudia pictured an old man with a slow ball high-fiving his teammates. Good for him. She turned her attention back to Peters.
“. . . where she screwed up was in assuming everyone would buy into the idea that Becker’s drowning was an accident.” Peters held up a finger. “One, she took us for backwater stooges who’d fall all over ourselves to help Mrs. Becker get her husband buried proper. You know how I know that?” He held up another finger. “Because two, she sure didn’t count on an autopsy.”
And she was almost right, thought Claudia. She twisted her napkin into a spiral and nodded for Peters to continue.
“When things didn’t go the way they planned, when everything backfired instead, Kensington and Rivens cut their losses. They took what they could and vanished. And this Babs—the arrogance! She didn’t even care anymore what we knew or suspected.”
Claudia followed his thinking. As expected, the crime lab had quickly put a match to Kensington’s prints on file and those they found liberally distributed in Mrs. Becker’s bathroom and bedroom. The younger woman hadn’t even made an effort to conceal them in the jewelry case itself.
Peters knocked lightly on the table to get her attention. Claudia looked up from her napkin.
“How long have I known you, Lieutenant?”
“Long enough to call me Claudia when we’re drinking coffee in a bowling alley.”
It was old territory for both of them, and Peters grinned. “I still call my daddy ‘sir’. You really think I can bring myself to call you by your given name?”
She flicked her napkin at him. He flicked it back. “I can never read anything much by your face, Lieutenant Claudia.”
She smiled.
“What I have learned by now is that your silence has a language. And since you haven’t said anything to my masterful summary I have to think that what seems so obvious to me doesn’t sit the same way with you. Am I right?”
Suggs would’ve been out of his chair, ready to throttle her for not spitting out an answer. If he still had a mustache, Moody would finger it, and Carella would be talking into the silence in a bid to hurry her along. Peters sat unblinking with the same Zen patience he showed when he filled out inventory forms and scheduling sheets.
“The problem I have with all of this,” she finally said, “is not with what’s obvious. It’s with what isn’t. All of Kensington’s moves have been obvious, almost predictable, at least in retrospect. But Barbara Becker . . . now there’s some kind of queen bee who looks to me less and less the way she appears.”
“You lost me.”
“Well, Mrs. Becker’s smart. I have trouble seeing her getting as addled as she would have to be to go along with Kensington as much as she did. Kensington suggested a move to Florida? Becker went along. Kensington insisted on a codicil? She went along. Kensington left Henry alone? No problem. And anyway, the idea that she’d just pluck Kensington out of a nursing home where she was working as an aide . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t play—and what else doesn’t play is the Houdini act she pulled on her friends.”
The bar’s fluorescent lights flickered twice, then flashed on. They hissed steadily. Claudia nodded to a young man who positioned himself behind the bar. It wouldn’t be long now before they’d have company.
“Where my money is, Ron? She’s sandbagging us on something.”
“Are you thinking that Mrs. Becker is working with Kensington and Rivens? If she is, then why didn’t she bolt too?”
“Good question, Ron. It could be that—”
Claudia’s cell phone rang. She picked up and listened, mouthing “Sally” to Peters. She muttered “uh-huh, uh-huh” a few times, shook her head and disconnected.
“Sally’s in love with my cell phone,” she told him. “She doesn’t have to fret over codes. Anyway, I guess we should get back. She says Booey’s practically wetting his pants, he’s so excited about something he wants to show me. He won’t tell her what.”
Peters laughed. “I only met him briefly, but I bet he even sleeps with enthusiasm.”
“Wouldn’t doubt it.”
They waved to the bartender on their way out, then paused at the snack counter to put in a takeout order. Sally wanted a burger and fries. Claudia watched the bowlers while they waited. It occurred to her that the dispatcher might be covering for the chief. She hoped not.
Chapter 24
No matter what he said, Booey clearly believed he had something. It showed in his voice. It showed in his posture. Claudia thought it even showed in his hair, which stood in sparks off his head from his anxious poking at it. He’d brought in his own computer, a high-end laptop that he described in tones so reverential she wondered if he lit incense in front of it at night. He ushered her
to a chair in front of the computer before she had her purse off her shoulder.
Booey had chosen a desk in the multipurpose room as far from the distraction of the dispatch console as possible. “This is probably nothing,” he told her sheepishly, “but it won’t take long.”
Claudia slid her purse to the floor. “Go for broke, Booey.”
He cleared a screen saver from the computer, revealing an image of a train. The perspective showed a locomotive looming in the foreground. The screen rendered the image sharply, impressively.
“That’s a freight train,” he said. “It’s not real, though. It’s one of Mr. Becker’s models.”
“Okaaay,” Claudia said slowly. “And I’m looking at it because . . . ?”
“Well, it’s just an introductory shot—sort of an opener to get us started. See, I went through the digital pictures I’d taken at the Becker place, and I put them in certain kind of order and then finally I burned them onto a CD-ROM so that everything I show you will make perfect sense.”
She hoped they would get to that soon.
“Pretty good image, isn’t it?”
“It’s terrific, Booey.”
“Thank you.”
He stood behind her so that his voice floated over her head. With every word he spoke she felt his breath move her hair. She would never make it through his entire presentation that way, and asked him to pull up a chair alongside her. After he complied she looked back at the train on the screen and told him to continue.
He put his hand on the mouse but stopped short of clicking to the next frame. “This is a little awkward,” he said uncomfortably. “The pictures, well, they’re all from that day when I, you know, went unauthorized into the Beckers’ garden, where Mr. Becker had his G-scale train display. Those are the large models. You probably remember . . .”
Sure she did. She’d wanted to kill him. “That was then. This is now. I presume you have a reason for bringing it up again, so let’s just move on.”
He clicked the mouse. The first image vanished, replaced by a panoramic scene that captured a horizontal slice of the garden. Booey must have crouched to get the shot, because except for a hint of the patio’s screening in the background the image showed a landscape that appeared real. A tall tree and a scattering of scrawny trees and shrubs that Claudia couldn’t name partially concealed a train track that ran parallel to a canal. The canal appeared to widen in the middle, but it was further obscured by yellowed grass. She remembered Becker’s impressive displays inside the house—villages, city streets with skyscrapers, beaches, farm communities—each of them elaborately detailed and fixed on camouflaged scaffolding. The image on Booey’s computer, though realistic, lacked the excitement and mastery of his other work.
“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t finished with this,” said Booey. “I was standing at a distance and so you can’t tell it on this picture, but some of the details are a little rough and part of the painting he did is spotty. But watch when I zoom in closer to this.” He pointed at some of the yellow grass in the image, then clicked the mouse. “Now look.”
Claudia leaned forward and studied the new picture. It took her eyes a second to adjust and at first she didn’t see anything but the grass, a tree and a shadowy cluster of shrubs. The she realized that Becker had included a figure by the shrubs.
“That’s clever,” she said. “What is that? A person?”
“Watch.” The image disappeared and a new one took its place. “This zooms in even more.”
Now it showed more clearly. Claudia could make out the figure well enough to understand that Becker had crafted a person who appeared to be kneeling or sitting, and reaching toward some . . . rocks? She sat back in her chair and removed her glasses to rub her eyes.
“It’s not a great angle,” said Booey, “and it’s not up to Mr. Becker’s standards. I think he probably just found a doll of some sort and then dressed it up.”
Claudia yawned. “It’s no Barbie doll, that’s for sure.” She put her glasses back on and looked at the screen again. “Do you have any more shots, or is this it? I’m not sure I get what you’re driving at.”
“Watch the next one. This one brings you in even closer.”
She was about to tell him to just explain the point of his demonstration when the new image flashed onto the screen. She sighed and looked, then stiffened. They weren’t rocks. They were cats, a dozen or more of them, each poorly constructed and even to her untrained eyes out of scale. But they were cats and clearly, in this shot, the figure was that of a woman.
“I’m looking at Wanda Farr and her cats, aren’t I,” Claudia said quietly. “This is the No-Name Pond.”
“You think so?” Booey’s voice hitched an octave. “Because that’s what I thought, but then I decided no, my imagination was probably running away with me. Sometimes it does that and so I almost didn’t show you. I thought that maybe Mr. Becker was only—”
“Oh, no. It’s Wanda Farr. It’s her. It’s her and those are some of her strays, and Becker knew her. Damn it!” Claudia exploded off the chair. “Carella, Moody, Peters—anybody who’s in, get over here, now!” She pivoted to Booey and pointed at him. “You—you’re promoted. I don’t know to what, but you’re promoted. Now go find your uncle.”
“Promoted! Wow, I—but wait, I have other pictures. Some of the angles—”
“And we’re going to look at them all. I need to make a quick phone call and then we’re going to look at them again and again and again. Now go. Get the chief and then back this up.” She gestured at the computer screen. I want the whole show all over, from the beginning. You just gave us something huge.”
* * *
The fingerprint examiner at Flagg County’s crime lab balked, not at her request but at the urgency. “Listen, this is nothing against Indian Run—I know you think you have something with the Farr case—but besides Flagg’s own cases we serve a lot of small departments. We have a backlog that could stretch from here to Tallahassee.”
Claudia wished she’d taken the time to personally meet more of the crime lab’s people. She didn’t know the examiner, a Liz Hurd, and though the woman sounded sympathetic, she wasn’t likely to be persuaded.
“Look,” said Claudia, “all I’m asking is that you pull the glass out of evidence again and take another look at it. You can do that, can’t you?”
“We can dust it with fluorescent powder and check it under high-intensity light,” Hurd replied, exasperation evident in her tone. “But it’ll take a day or two. I can’t get to it any faster.”
The smudged fingerprint on the glass at Farr’s trailer showed only four points of identification, not enough for a match. But a fluorescent examination—potential gold. It might reveal more, maybe even ten or twelve points. The lab could shoot a photo and work off that for a match. It could work and if it did, the match might give them Farr’s killer.
“Please,” said Claudia. “I need this.”
Hurd let a moment pass. “You should’ve asked for this sooner, you know. Like when you found the victim.”
Nothing would be gained by getting into a pissing match with the woman. If Hurd had been around the block even once, then she already understood that precious few fingerprints ever went beyond routine analysis. Of course, it didn’t help to know that Hurd was right, or close enough to being right for Claudia to chafe. She did sit on the prints too long. She’d waffled with indecision. Plain and simple. A beginner’s mistake, and a big one.
“I’d consider it a personal favor if you’d try to rush things, Ms. Hurd. I’ll owe you.”
“That’s what everybody says,” Hurd muttered, but Claudia sensed some give in her tone and when the woman said she’d try, she thanked her with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. As soon as she hung up she asked Sally to fax a formal request to Hurd’s attention, then returned to the multipurpose room where the others were waiting.
“About time, Hershey,” said Suggs. He stood with his arms crossed in front of the laptop. “Bo
oey’s gone about as numb in the mouth as you are and won’t tell me what’s going on. I’m about out of patience.”
“Sorry for the delay,” Claudia said, ignoring his sarcasm. She took a place beside Peters. “Where’s Mitch and Emory?”
“While you were sucking up breakfast at the bowling alley I sent them out to a traffic accident that was turning unfriendly fast,” said Suggs. “Two pickups and a car. No injuries, but seven people involved.”
“You sent them now? Now’s when we need them most.”
Suggs held up a hand. “I know that, Hershey, but here’s a little reality check for you. Much as I might want to throw everyone I got onto these cases and as much as I know you want me to, I can’t put the whole town on hold while we figure things out. All of patrol had somethin’ going and I needed a man out there, so I sent Moody. He radioed in for backup because some joker was startin’ to take swings at the driver who rammed him. I had no choice to put Carella on it. They’ll be back before long, all right?”
“I’m sorry. You’re right.”
Suggs nodded. “Damned right I’m right. So what is it that’s got you all worked up?”
Claudia turned to Booey. “It’s your show, Boo.” Had she just called him ‘Boo’? She shook her head. “Show them what you just showed me.”
This time, she narrated, at least up until the point when Booey put some additional pictures on the screen. They all captured parts of the same scene, and though one included what must have been the footbridge, none showed the doll-like figure or cats as clearly. Still, together they made a powerful statement for a link between the two victims.
“Wanda Farr and Henry Becker both wandered,” said Claudia. “They lived on opposite sides of the train track, but both were in walking distance of it. Farr included the No-Name in her walks because there were strays there. Becker included it because he loved trains. Even though trains don’t run by the No-Name anymore, it still had a track. That was attraction enough for him. It’s no coincidence that he put Farr in his model display.”
The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries Page 46