THE SHAKESPEARE MURDERS

by Marshall Huffman

  THE

  SHAKESPEARE

  MURDERS

  Angie Bartoni

  Case File # 8

  By

  MW HUFFMAN

  THE SHAKESPEARE MURDERS©2013

  By MW Huffman

  All Rights Reserved

  “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

  - Hamlet (Act II, Sc. II)

  A Note to those that miss something. The antagonist often misquotes Shakespeare. Keep in mind, he is not Shakespeare but a ‘want to be’. Some readers seemed to miss that part.

  OTHER BOOKS BY MW HUFFMAN

  THE END–BOOK I of The Event Series

  THE BEGINNING–BOOK II of The Event Series

  THE REVELATION–BOOK III of The Event Series

  The Second Civil War–BOOK I-A Nation Divided

  The Second Civil War–Book II-A Nation at War

  The Second Civil War–Book III–A Nation Healing

  Project BlueBolt – BOOK I – American Gulags

  Project BlueBolt – BOOK II - The Gulag Journal

  Project BlueBolt – BOOK III – American Uprising

  REVOLUTION

  THE BRINK

  CLOSE PROXIMITY

  BLACKSTAR

  CHIMERA

  WORLDS END

  SUN BURST

  Sins of the Fathers

  The Unfinished

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 1 - The Alphabet Murders

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 2 - Frost Bite

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 3 - Dead Aim

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 4 - What Goes Around

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 5 - Nothing to Lose

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 6 - Shadow Man

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 7 – The Club

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 8 – Shakespeare Murders

  Angie Bartoni Case File # 9 – One Too Many

  Angie Bartoni Case File #10 – Weak Link

  Angie Bartoni Case File #11 – Vanishing Act

  Angie Bartoni Case File #12 – Victim’s Advocate

  Angie Bartoni Case File #13 – Payback

  Angie Bartoni Case File #14 – Dead on Arrival

  The Logan Files - Blond Deception

  The Logan Files - Innocence and Avarice

  The Logan Files - The Deal Breaker

  The Logan Files – Pain Center

  Norris Files – Insurrection

  Norris Files - Silver2

  The Shakespeare Murders©2013 by

  Marshall Huffman

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction from the mind of the author. It is not representative of anyone living or dead, except for Shakespeare who of course was a real person.

  Thanks to my wife, Susan, for reading, correcting and pointing out inconsistencies in this book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was pretty sure that it was at least a hundred below zero. Okay, it was twenty-eight degrees but with the wind blowing so hard it sure as heck felt that cold. Cold weather is not my cup of tea. Right now my feet are frozen, my face hurt and my fingers are numb. Gee, I was having a swell time. I especially liked how my nostrils froze every time I took a breath.

  I shivered and ducked under the yellow tape that was doing wild gyrations in the breeze. The snow crunched under my boots as I made my way across the field to where three other cops stood huddled together. They seemed about as happy as I was to be standing there freezing their butts off.

  “What the hell took you so long? The CSI techs left a good twenty minutes ago,” Barry Lake growled.

  Barry hated the cold as much as I did and waiting even more. That’s a bad combination for a cop in the Midwest.

  What could I say? Nothing that would appease him so I just grunted. He mumbled something under his breath but the wind swept it away.

  “Over here,” Lisa Manchester, said, starting off toward the woods. Lisa was Barry’s partner had only been on the force for two years but she had surprised everyone with her ability to handle tough situations. She didn’t back off from the difficult cases and she didn’t back down from the other buttheads in the precinct who thought they were going to run over her. In my opinion, her only major fault was that she tried too hard to be tough. You don’t have to be a badass all the time as I had to learn for myself as a female cop.

  “Well,” I said, bending down to look at the body. That is different.”

  “No kidding Bartoni. Boy you are on top of things today,” Barry replied.

  I ignored his sarcasm. It was way too cold to argue.

  “Someone was really mad at this poor bastard,” I said, looking at his elbows and knees.

  “I would say more than a little mad,” Dan Roberts said coming up to join us.

  Dan was my partner and we were going on our third year together which was some kind of a record for me. Usually they took off with their hair blowing back or I got them shot.

  Eric was the fifth person in the happy little party that had been waiting. Eric wasn’t much of a cop. He had never been and never would be. His old man was the retired Commissioner of Police so by virtue of linage he couldn’t be touched. He knew it and used it to his advantage. Basically he was a jerk but it had its advantages. You knew you could never count on him to do anything worthwhile so you had no false expectations.

  “Has the ME been notified?” I asked, looking at where the body’s big toe used to be.

  “Should be here in ten minutes,” Lisa said.

  “Christ. Ten more minutes? I’ll freeze my gonads off by then,” Lake grumbled.

  “Big deal, you don’t need them anyway,” Lisa said.

  “Knock it off. You guys can leave if you want. Dan and I’ll wait for the ME,” I replied.

  I was cold and miserable and the last thing I wanted was to have a bunch of whining going on. They could all take a hike as far as I was concerned.

  “Works for me,” Eric said walking off. Surprise, surprise.

  “You sure the hell don’t need me,” Barry replied and followed Eric off towards the cars and warmth.

  Lisa stayed. Wanted to show she could take it was my best guess.

  “He has something stuck in his mouth,” I said to Dan.

  “Really?” he said, stooping down to look.

  “Don’t touch it. I’ll let the ME get it out.”

  “Why would someone do something like that?” Lisa asked.

  “I guess for the same reason they stabbed the poor guy six times but didn’t actually kill him right away. They wanted it to hurt. A lot. My guess is that the note will probably tell us why or give us a clue. I just hope this isn’t a damn game to some nut,” I told her.

  “A serial killer?”

  “Serial, revenge or whatever. One is bad enough but if this is just the first then the whole game plan changes.”

  We watched as Doctor Sorenson drove up and walked across the field. He was pretty spry for a sixty-seven year old man and navigated the snow better than I had.

  “Great day,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  “You’re sick.”

  “You don’t like this? If there were some mountains around here I would be out skiing today. It’s perfect,” he said.

  “You could cross country ski,” Dan suggested.

  “No sir. Give me a mountain and real skis. And no ridicules snowboards. Real skis by God or nothing. Throw in some powder and life is gooood.”

  “I see why you became an ME. You are a sick old man,” I said.

  He stuck his tongue out at me.

  “Mature,” Lisa said.

  He stuck his tongue out at her.

  “So, what have we got here?” he said looking down at our frozen John
Doe.

  “A dead guy?”

  “No kidding? I thought you had bagged a deer. I dead man? I’ll be damned. Right off hand it doesn’t look like an accident and I’m pretty sure I can rule out suicide unless this guy was the world’s worst with a knife,” Dr. Sorenson said.

  “Ya think?”

  “Just guessing. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this looks like a homicide.”

  “Wow. You really are good. See Lisa, I said he was sharp.”

  She just looked at us like we had lost our minds. I probably had by now from the cold. I don’t function very well when my brain freezes. It’s kind of like when you take a big drink of a slushy and freeze your head. The pain causes you to just stop functioning for a few seconds. It’s that with me when my head gets too cold.

  “Oh, he has something stuck in his mouth,” I said, rubbing my forehead.

  “His tongue?”

  “Besides that.”

  “Ah...yes. I see it. Some fan mail?”

  “God, I hope not,” I said.

  “Usually notes are not a good thing. It almost always leads to more clues and dead bodies,” he said using a pair of tweezers to pull the folded paper out of the man’s mouth.

  “You’ll need latex gloves,” he said.

  “Just put it in a bag for now and I’ll read it in the car,” I told him.

  “You big baby.”

  “Big cold baby,” I corrected.

  Sorenson placed the note in an evidence bag and handed it over to me. I placed it in my pocket.

  “Looks like someone dumped him here,” the doc said.

  “He sure wasn’t killed here. Not near enough blood. I looked under his body and there are no marks on the ground. There’s hardly any blood, just seepage. The show covered up any tracks. If you look real carefully you can just make out a set of tire tracks going off in that direction,” I said pointing slightly northwest.

  The depression was fairly faint but if you got low enough you could just make it out.

  “I’ll take your word for it. I cannot see a damn thing with the glare off the snow.”

  “How the hell did you see that?” Lisa asked.

  “As soon as I realized he was killed someplace else I figured someone dumped him here and it’s too far to the road to carry that much dead weight. I figured they must have driven out here and dumped him. Obviously they had to have a four wheel drive vehicle” I said.

  Lisa still had a lot to learn about the basics. I knew she wanted to be a detective but she was way too green at this point to even be considered.

  “All right you geniuses, you can go. The wagon is on the way and I’ll know more after I get this poor smuck back. Let me know what the note says. You know I love a good murder mystery,” the ME said, smiling.

  “Sure, it’s not like we don’t have enough of them. Call me when you get done having fun and we can swap stories,” I said and started for the car.

  “What do you want me to do?” Lisa asked, coming up beside me.

  “Your car is here, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then go do cop stuff. I’m going back to the station to start the report and fill the captain in,” I said.

  “Can I work this one with you?” she asked.

  “Geez Lisa, you know that’s not my call. The captain will make the assignments,” I said trying to avoid answering her directly.

  It’s not that I didn’t like her but Dan and I work better as a team. I have very little political correctness and I have a tendency to blurt out what I think. I like to call it candor but most people tell me I’m too damn blunt. Since I have no political aspirations, butt kissing isn’t all that important to me.

  **

  My name is Angie Bartoni. Most people just call me Bartoni. I’m obviously a detective. I’m five foot five, just a tad over forty, not a beauty but kind of attractive in my own way, I guess. I have brown hair and eyes and my weight is none of your business.

  Dan is my hunky partner but one of my rules is that I never get involved with any cop. No way in hell is that ever going to work out so I just refuse to even consider a romance with another cop. Besides, at the present time, a handsome and interesting Dr. Ben Warman is interested in a relationship with me. Why in the world he would want me is a mystery, but I am learning to appreciate his attentions.

  I’ve been a detective for a lot of years now and at times I stop and ask myself why would any sane person do this job? Then I remember. I’m not all that sane, so I go on. Cops see some strange stuff. It never ceases to amaze me how inhumane the human race can be. No matter what you believe in, evolution or God’s creation, something went wrong with the experiment. We don’t seem to be progressing. In fact we seem to be doing just the opposite. We kill each other over the stupidest things and in the most horrendous ways for virtually no reason at all. We strap on bombs and kill people we don’t know or have anything against other than they happened to be there at the time.

  We murder our spouses rather than get a divorce. Kids are abused and kidnapped by sick perverts at an alarming rate. The courts smack them on the wrist and let them go out and do it all over again. Don’t even get me started on what I think about plea bargaining. And through all of this we call ourselves civilized. What standard are we using to measure civilized behavior? It sure beats the hell out of me.

  I was sitting at my desk thinking about the guy in the field. He must have made someone really angry, or he ran into a twenty-four carrot nutcase. At this point I figured it could go either way. Someone had enjoyed watching him die slowly. The poor guy had to endure the shattering of each joint one at a time. Both knees, elbows, and ankles had been stabbed and the big toe on his right foot had been sliced off. I grimaced at the thought of the pain.

  How long did the guy suffer? What a horrible way to die. Maybe he was ready in the end. Who knows?

  “Bartoni,” the captain said, sticking his head out of his office door.

  “Coming,” I replied.

  I was glad for the distraction. I was starting to get sympathy pains in my knees and elbows.

  “Got any theories?” he asked after I settled in on the sagging leather couch.

  “Not really, other than I don’t think this is the last of it.”

  “What? Why? What the hell makes you say that?” McGregor, my boss, said.

  “The note,” I said handing it over.

  "I will speak daggers to her, but use none".

  “What the hell?”

  “Shakespeare.”

  “Shakespeare? You mean he’s going around killing people?”

  “Give me a break. William Shakespeare. It’s a quote from Hamlet, act three, scene two.

  “How in the hell do you know that?”

  “Why Chief, I’m surprised at you. I used to be on the stage in my youth,” I replied.

  “Probably one of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” he said.

  “No uneducated one, that was the Nutcracker Suite.”

  “I don’t care about your higher education, just tell me what it means.”

  “I don’t really know what it means because it doesn’t seem to make a darn bit of sense in relation to this dude we found. He was stabbed six times, so the daggers part could work, but unless the ME finds out that he was actually a her, I have no clue.”

  “Great. So are you thinking it may be a clue to the next murder?”

  “Well…”

  “I don’t need this crap Bartoni. We’ve got a brand new Commissioner and he has promised a ten percent drop in violent crime this year. If we’ve got some nut running around my rear will be under a microscope from now on. I sure hope you’re wrong about this.”

  “Hey, I’m not too thrilled about it either. If he is on your rear, you’ll be on mine and then we will get all pissed at each other and everything will go to hell in a hand cart,” I replied.

  “Then go get this perp before he does anything else.”

  “Oh sure. It’s a thousand below ze
ro, we don’t have a single clue and on top of that, we don’t have the first idea who the victim even is. No problem captain.”

  “Good. Then you should have something for me to tell the commissioner before all of this hits the papers.”

  What could I say? I just looked at him but he was already ignoring me. I lingered to see if he would look up but I knew he could out wait me out, so I finally left. I think I heard him laugh as I went out the door.

  **

  “He bled out.”

  “No kidding. I figured that out all by myself.”

  “Okay smartass, you do the autopsy next time,” Doctor Sorenson said.

  “Any ID yet?

  “Lifted his prints, they are looking in the system as we speak. Same for the tattoo. Maybe we will get lucky. He had smooth hands so he didn’t do manual labor. The knife was something our data base isn’t identifying. Hard to say exactly what was used. I didn’t get a very good cast due to the fractures. Darned inconvenient.”

  “I’ll mention it to him.”

  “Someone should.”

  “Anything else Dr. Caregiver?”

  “Yes. He smoked. Way too much. He was probably going to die of lung cancer anyway. He was doing a good job of killing himself.”

  “People do stupid things,” I said.

  “Okay, so what did it say?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t pull that crap with me Bartoni. I’ll shove a syringe of formaldehyde in you the next time I see you.”

  “Damn, you’re getting grumpy in your old age,” I replied.

  “Just tell me what the doggone note said.”

  “It was a quote from William Shakespeare. I will speak daggers to her, but use none,” I told him.

  “Hamlet,” the good Doctor said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What in the world does that mean? That is no lady lying on the slab over there,” he said.

  “I figured that. So what does that leave us with?”

  “That’s not my problem. That’s why they call you a detective. You’re supposed to detect stuff like that. I’m just a humble civil employee. I just slice and dice.”

  “Then I’ll quit talking to you and go detect something.”