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

by Laura Belgrave

  “Yeah,” she lied.

  “Good. That’s good.”

  A dog in the neighborhood started up. A second later another joined it. Hemmer’s gated community was plenty awake and plenty excited. Neighbors had logged off the Internet and taken a pass on HBO to get as close as they could to the prime time show right on their block. Now that they were there, they stood in small, quiet groups, feigning nonchalance.

  Claudia watched them for a few seconds. “There’s a girl who’s fatherless tonight. It didn’t have to be that way. It almost wasn’t.” She peered through the mist at Hemmer’s house. Yellow crime scene tape was looped around it and a cluster of officers stood just outside the front door, talking in low voices.

  Paint and a patio. It didn’t seem that much too ask.

  Chapter 4

  The Chief had it all wrong. Bill Bonolo did indeed want to make some noise. He was making some noise—had begun making noise before the evening at Hemmer’s played itself out. He’d cast himself as the savior of them all, contrasting his own aggressive actions against what he called the “surprisingly timid” response of the Indian Run police detective.

  Claudia had watched him preen to neighbors at Hemmer’s property and by the time the press began arriving he had his lines well rehearsed for the most dramatic effect. He threw a few good quotes to a reporter from the town’s twice-weekly paper, the Indian Run Gazette, but sandbagged the best for the out-of-town TV stations and papers that either got tipped or picked up on events from their police scanners. The Orlando Sentinel had dispatched a reporter and photographer. They must have broken every speed limit to get there, because they arrived in time for the photographer to capture a shot of Hemmer’s body being removed from the house. The picture, which ran in this morning’s paper, showed Claudia in the foreground, wrapped in the paramedic’s blanket.

  But that was then and this was now. Now she was on her couch in front of the TV, distractedly petting the cat and watching Bonolo run his mouth on the six o’clock news. He’d obviously had no trouble sleeping in the twenty-four hours since he’d stabbed Hemmer in the neck. His eyes were alert, his posture smug. The TV reporter had propped him in front of Willow Whisper’s gates, where Bonolo somberly talked about how shaken the community remained from the previous night’s violence. He called what happened “chilling” and said he was just relieved he could resolve the standoff before anyone got killed.

  Right. Like Hemmer didn’t count.

  Claudia kept her eyes on the TV while she reached for the aspirin bottle on her coffee table. She looked like hell and felt like hell, and knew it showed. The blow to the back of her head from Hemmer’s gun had settled down. But the knock to the front of her head from the floor still throbbed dully. She chased three aspirins with a cup of coffee gone cold.

  The camera man briefly panned on the reporter, a kid from Channel 3’s Land of Rivers’ station. His name was Eric Morley and Claudia had tangled with him before. She watched him adjust his expression to affect concern while he framed his next question.

  “Mr. Bonolo,” he said, “last night you made some serious allegations about the way Detective Lieutenant Claudia Hershey handled the hostage situation at Mr. Hemmer’s house. What specifically troubled you about her response?”

  The camera man cut to Bonolo and slowly zoomed in. He had a square face with big parts—big nose, big lips, big chin, big ears—and a beige complexion that Claudia knew could mottle red with rage in seconds.

  “Look,” he said, waving a thick hand, “I don’t mean to sound insulting. I’m sure Lieutenant Hershey is a fine police officer. But last night she had more than one opportunity to end things quickly. Hemmer was distracted a lot. And he was smaller than her. You’d think with her training she would’ve jumped on those advantages to disarm him.”

  “If our information is correct, she couldn’t have known Hemmer’s gun was unloaded,” Morley reminded Bonolo. “Isn’t it possible she was just responding cautiously?”

  “Anything’s possible.” Bonolo shrugged in a way that made it clear he didn’t think it was possible at all. “Look, my concerns are based on the totality of her response, starting with the way she let herself be conned by Hemmer before she was even in the door.”

  Totality. Claudia rolled her eyes.

  “Our information is that he allegedly conned everybody,” Morley said.

  Bonolo smirked. “Yeah, well, the rest of us aren’t exactly seasoned police detectives. We were just trying to be good neighbors.”

  Morley nodded sympathetically and let it go. He already had a gripping story of heroics. Why screw it up?

  The cat lightly jumped from the couch and began playing with Claudia’s bare feet. She wiggled her toes for him while Morley laid out fluff about the “shattered serenity” of Willow Whisper. He mentioned the other hostages, intimating that all but Bonolo were still too shaken to go on camera. Claudia guessed they might be more embarrassed than shaken. Hemmer had lured them over in half-hour increments, seducing each of them with outrageous promises of conciliation and a fat donation for the community. Jennifer Parrish was the first to arrive. He walked her through taping up each hostage in turn, then bound her with the tape when the others were secured on the floor.

  Suggs had insisted on conducting the hostage interviews himself. The preliminary story he cobbled together showed Hemmer to be either extraordinarily precise or just plain lucky. “Hemmer was never even a grunt in the Army,” Suggs had told Claudia. “Didn’t matter. The way he got ’em in his house? The way he got ’em locked together like a bunch of Lincoln Logs? The fella operated like a military strategist.” She hadn’t bothered to point out the persuasive power of Hemmer’s gun.

  Morley was wrapping up. He asked Bonolo whether he had anything more to add.

  Bonolo pretended to think, his simian face contorting with the effort. “I don’t want to leave your viewers with the wrong impression, or make them think they can’t trust the police to protect them. This Detective Hershey? What happened to her last night might’ve been a one-shot thing. From what the mayor told me, she was just tired. Battle fatigue, stress—call it what you want. The mayor said she’d recently finished a difficult case and was about to take a vacation. Maybe she should’ve taken it sooner. I’m sure she would’ve been more capable.”

  Claudia stared disbelievingly at the TV. The mayor? The mayor had fed that to Bonolo? She sprang off the couch and headed for the kitchen phone, furious. The cat hissed and sprinted out of her path. But just as she reached for the phone, it rang. She snatched it up and barked a hello.

  “Mom, it’s me.” Robin choked on a sob. “Sandi’s dad is dead.”

  Claudia felt her world shift with the pain in her daughter’s voice. “I know, baby. It happened—”

  “A camp counselor came into our cabin and woke her up last night and told her there was a family emergency. It was all hush-hush, but the rest of us in the cabin heard her tell Sandi everything would be all right, like there was no really big deal, like maybe someone just had a little heart attack or something. But it was a lie, Mom! Her dad was dead! He was already dead.”

  “Robin, honey—”

  “They knew and they lied. Now she doesn’t have anyone and they’re making like her dad was a criminal. They said you were there. They said Sandi’s dad had hostages and you didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  Claudia closed her eyes. “Is that what you think?” she asked softly. She waited a beat. “Robin?”

  “I . . . it’s just . . . the kids here are all saying stuff.”

  Claudia heard her stifle another sob. “What they’re saying doesn’t matter. What you think does.” She could hear Robin breathing and imagined her crouched somewhere with a phone, maybe in a camp office, trying not to be seen, trying to overcome the doubt that shaded her voice. The kids had already asked her to pick a side. Now her mother was doing the same. “Robin? Do you want to come home?”

  When her daughter finally spoke again, the quiver
in her voice was gone. “No.” She repeated it more strongly. “I mean, if they want to be stupid and believe the first thing they hear, then that’s their problem.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You asked me what I think. That’s what I think. If I left they’d just assume everything they heard is true.”

  Translation: They’d think mother and daughter were both cowards.

  They talked a while longer. Claudia tried to explain that Robin didn’t need to defend her, but Robin didn’t want to discuss it anymore. She wanted to talk about Sandi. Claudia already knew the girl’s grandparents had flown in to take her out of camp. What she didn’t know was that the girl’s mother had died of breast cancer two years earlier. That’s why Sandi had been living with Steven Hemmer. That’s why he’d changed jobs. That’s why he’d bought the house in Willow Whisper and why he wanted to spruce it up. He’d wanted what Claudia had wanted for Robin when she moved them from Cleveland. He’d wanted a stable environment in which to raise his daughter—in his case a daughter who had suffered not only the pain of divorce but had felt at too young an age the intractable sorrow of loss. Steven Hemmer wanted to fix things: his life, his daughter’s life. The house, Claudia thought, must have come to represent a symbol of both.

  “Will you check on her, Mom? Her grandparents are staying in a hotel just outside town. They’ll be there through the weekend, and then I guess they’re taking Sandi home with them to Maine. At least I think it’s Maine. It’s just . . . I didn’t get to say goodbye. Will you do it?”

  Claudia could think of a dozen reasons not to. She couldn’t think of a single good one. She told Robin that sure, she’d try to see the girl before she left. Robin reeled off instructions: what to say, how to say it, what to bring—the old Pooh bear that she’d insisted she’d outgrown but until now would not give up—and then she grilled her mother about whether she was feeding the cat properly.

  “Boo’s fine,” said Claudia, biting her tongue not to remind Robin that she’d only been gone a day, not enough time for her mother to starve the animal. “He eats more than I do and he’s still working on shredding the couch. I assume that means he’s happy.”

  She reiterated that she’d try to see Sandi, and then they hung up. She stared unseeing at the kitchen counter, waiting for the calm that ordinarily followed a phone call from Robin on those rare occasions when her daughter was away. Nothing. She ate a hunk of leftover roast beef, giving it more time. Still nothing.

  Boo had come out of hiding, so she gave him a scratch behind the ear, then dumped some dry food into his bowl. She brushed her teeth. She brushed her hair. She changed into jeans. She fooled with her oboe for a while. Still . . . nothing. A few minutes later she grabbed her purse and car keys and headed out the door.

  * * *

  The mayor of Indian Run stood five-foot-seven in lifts and all his weight-training and jogging would never change that. To the never-ending amusement of the town’s residents, he kept trying, though. Rumor had it that the mayor owned some kind of contraption designed to let him hang upside down, and that he used it for a half hour every morning and every night, the idea being that he would lengthen his frame while simultaneously improving blood circulation. Chief Mac Suggs was particularly fond of this particular rumor—and of the mayor, there were many such rumors—but of course the chief would never give voice to the rumor himself. At least he wouldn’t do so unless fueled by one too many beers and strictly in the company of those he trusted. The mayor held the chief’s career in his hands, and though the mayor’s hands were tiny, his power was not. If he wanted he could sway the town council into disbanding the police department altogether and contracting law enforcement services over to the Flagg County Sheriff’s Office.

  For Claudia, the chief’s fear and distrust of the mayor presented a dilemma. She wanted to look the mayor in the eyes and ask him about his remarks to Bonolo—and she wanted to do it now, right now, and unannounced—but she didn’t want to put the chief in a situation that might compromise him and most certainly would piss him off. Even in Indian Run, there was a chain of command. On the other hand, if she told Suggs what she wanted to do he would forbid it.

  Claudia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, half listening to a soft jazz station on the Cavalier’s radio while she debated. She was not given to impulsive behavior in her professional life. Truthfully, she wasn’t often impulsive in her personal life either, a factor that had created some of the ugliness in her marriage to Brian, a man who too often confused recklessness with spontaneity. Of course, Robin had been conceived in one such reckless moment and for that Claudia was grateful. She was less forgiving about the reckless moments he’d shared with other women.

  Go? Not go? She sat for another five minutes and had just about talked herself back out of the car when she heard Bonolo’s voice again, this time during a news break on the radio show. The newscaster was using a tape from its TV affiliate, keeping the story alive and reminding listeners to tune in for a talk show later on. He invited them to call in with comments on the “hostage fiasco” in Whisper Willow, then moved to a commercial break.

  Claudia drummed her fingers one more time. Then she gunned the engine and backed out of the driveway.

  Chapter 5

  An annoying second thought nagged at Claudia while she stood at the mayor’s front door, but by then it was too late. She’d already pressed the doorbell. Mayor Arthur Lane himself answered, opening the door to the festive sounds of a party going on behind him. They’d met only once before, and then only briefly, but the recognition in his eyes was immediate. He improvised a smile, the politician in him shifting into overdrive.

  “Lieutenant Hershey! What a surprise!”

  Lane’s hand shot out and Claudia shook it. It was one of those wimp shakes that men sometimes reserved for women, as if fearful they might break something.

  “Oh-oh. I bet I know what it is.” Lane feigned a playful tone. “It’s the noise, right?” He winked and thumbed the air behind him. “I invited just about the whole neighborhood so no one would complain, but you never know.”

  She looked at him.

  “Of course, I can turn down the stereo.” He flashed some teeth. “Not a problem.”

  Country western music spilled through the doorway. Laughter rode above it. Claudia heard someone yell that the phone was ringing.

  “It’s a birthday party,” Lane said. “Mine, as a matter of fact. Just turned forty-one, though I don’t feel a day over thirty.” He smoothed back his hair, which was thick and wavy and carefully maintained with Grecian Formula. “Care to join us?”

  “Happy birthday. No thank you. Eric Morley interviewed Bill Bonolo about the hostage situation on the six o’clock news. I presume you saw it?”

  Lane stepped into the humid night air and closed the door. “I saw it.” He shrugged. “Bill Bonolo’s a colorful character.”

  “He’s also inaccurate as hell, and he’s using you to lend credence to the outrageous version of events he’s putting in front of the public.” Claudia hadn’t moved when Lane stepped forward, forcing him to inch into the towering shadow she cast from a street light behind her. She smelled cheese and alcohol on his breath. “He quoted you as saying you believed I was ‘tired.’ Since you and I never spoke, I can’t believe that’s what you actually said and I know it’s not something Chief Suggs would’ve said to you.”

  The mayor cleared his throat and concentrated on her shirt collar. “You have to understand that when you’re dealing with an excitable situation and excitable people, you sometimes have to mollify them any way you can so things don’t escalate.”

  “So that is what you said.”

  “You’re making too much of this.”

  “Is it a lawsuit you’re worried about? Is that it? You’re worried Bonolo will sue the town?”

  “It’s my job to head off potential litigation.” He glanced up. “I do my job.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Lane ba
tted at a stray moth. “Look, this’ll all die down. Trust me.”

  “It’ll leave the wrong impression.”

  “You’ll weather it.”

  “This isn’t just about me, Mr. Mayor. It’s about a young girl who woke up in the morning excited about going to camp and went to bed thinking that her father had turned into a brute so villainous that even the cops wouldn’t try to protect him.”

  “Hemmer is the villain here,” Lane said. “Don’t forget that.” He was spared Claudia’s response when the door abruptly opened, thudding into his back. A face peeked out. “Artie? What’re you doing out there?”

  Claudia stepped back and Lane shifted into the spot she’d vacated. The door opened all the way and a petite woman said, “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize you had company.” She looked curiously at Claudia, but when it became apparent that introductions wouldn’t be forthcoming she turned her attention back to Lane. “Honey, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re about out of ice. Also, the toilet in the guest bathroom is running again. I tried jiggling the handle, but I guess I don’t have your touch.”

  Lane looked embarrassed. “Sure, sure,” he mumbled. “Just give me a minute, Lorna.”

  The door began to close, but then opened again just as abruptly. “Sorry. One more thing. Boyd Manning called. He’s on his way, but he said his truck had a flat and he’ll be about another twenty minutes or so. Want me to reach him on his cell phone and see if he’ll pick up the ice?”

  “What? I . . . no. I’ll go. Just let me finish up out here.”

  Lorna rolled her eyes. “Get two bags.”

  She vanished and Lane closed the door again. “As you can see, I’m pretty busy, Lieutenant.”

  “Right. A toilet to fix and ice to fetch.”

  This time the mayor looked up. His eyes flashed. “You’re way out of line here, Ms. Hershey. This conversation is over.” He pivoted and opened the door to go in.