by Lauren Carr
“In front of reporters,” Eli said with a smile.
“Looks like you’ve redeemed yourself,” Mac said.
“Couldn’t have done it without your help, Mac.” Eli gripped Mac’s hand.
“You were the one who didn’t give up the trail when it got cold,” Mac said. “It was fresh again when I picked it up.”
“Are you giving back everything your mother stole?” Catherine asked Millicent.
“Only the famous pieces of art that she had stolen from museums,” Millicent said. “As for the jewels, she had broken all of them down. So I’m going to lend the gowns to the Smithsonian.”
“Those gowns are pieces of art.” Catherine turned to Mac, “Too bad that you don’t get to keep the diamond gown.”
“It isn’t my color,” Mac said.
“Did you notice how heavy that thing was?” Archie said. “It has to weigh at least twenty-five pounds.”
“All in precious stones,” Catherine gushed. “Now that is a dress to die for.”
The End
COUNTDOWN TO MURDER
A Lovers in Crime Mystery Short
What did people do before ATMs were invented? Same thing they did before God invented credit cards. They only bought what they had the money to buy …
Cameron grimaced at her reflection in her SUV’s rearview mirror. Her greenish-brown eyes narrowed to accentuate the laugh lines in the corner of her eyes.
I sound like my mother. Am I really that old? Isn’t forty supposed to be the new thirty, which used to be middle-aged? Not anymore. If I’m so young, why do I sound like my mother?
Ordering herself to get on with it, Cameron climbed out of her car and went into the ATM booth next to the shopping center in Robinson Township, outside Pittsburgh. She slipped her card into the slot and punched in the PIN number.
Quick cash? Then I’ll be back here in a couple of days. But then, I don’t like carrying lots of cash. Ah, just go for the whole hundred bucks.
She hit the button for a hundred dollars.
The booth’s door opened and closed.
In the mirror concealing the security camera, she saw the man pull the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head to hide his face before he pushed up against her. Along with the odor of sweat and cigarettes, she felt the pressure of a gun against her side.
Without turning around, she asked his reflection in the mirror, “Seriously?”
“Give me your money.” He moved in closer so that she could feel his hot, foul breath steaming up her short wavy brown hair.
“This is why I hate ATMs,” she told whoever would be viewing the security footage.
Laughing, the desk sergeant at the state police barracks in Robinson Township stood up from where he was bent over a schedule when he saw Homicide Detective Cameron Gates barge through the doors with a suspect in handcuffs. She had pulled down the black hood on his jacket to reveal his bloody ears and nose.
“Help!” the attempted thief screamed out. “This bitch is crazy!”
After shoving the suspect up against the desk, Cameron slapped the gun she had taken from him down in front of the sergeant. “Here’s your ATM bandit.”
“I’m filing a complaint!” the thief told the sergeant. “Police brutality. She ripped my ear plugs right out of my earlobes—not to mention what she did to my balls. I tell you, if I end up being impotent, it’s her fault. There’s laws against using Tazers there! If there aren’t, there should be. I want a lawyer!”
“Get in line,” Cameron said.
“I never would have tried to rob her if I had known she was a crazy cop!” the thief told the desk sergeant. “Isn’t that entrapment?”
“Not a cop,” the desk sergeant told him. “Homicide detective.” He clasped the thief by the shoulder. “We have a half dozen victims waiting to see you in lineup.” He turned to Cameron. “You know the drill. Let’s get that gun into evidence.” He took the thief and gun away to booking.
Once they were gone, Cameron noticed a woman sitting alone at a desk belonging to one of the troopers on duty. While it was not unusual for a citizen to be filing a complaint in the squad room, as well as sobbing; it was an unusual sight to see a pregnant woman with a bag filled with black dead roses.
There’s got to be a story here.
Cameron stepped over to the woman. “Hello, are you being helped?”
With wide tear-filled eyes, the young woman looked up at the detective, dressed in a black pant suit, with a gold detective’s badge clipped to her belt. On the other hip, she wore her 9-mm Colt semi-automatic. “Are you a detective?”
“I’m Detective Cameron Gates.” She pulled up a chair and sat down. “And you are …”
“Tiffany Ambrose.” She shook the detective’s hand.
“Boyfriend problems?” Cameron nodded her head in the direction of the roses.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” When Tiffany saw Cameron’s eyebrow arch, she grasped her bulging stomach. “My husband died four months ago. He was in the Navy and killed in a helicopter accident in Afghanistan. He was only supposed to be over there thirty days.” She hung her head. “Now he’s gone forever.”
“I’m sorry,” Cameron said. “My husband is a retired Navy guy. My step-son is a Navy ensign and stationed at the Pentagon.”
Tiffany wiped her eyes. “Jeff was planning to make Navy his career. His getting killed is the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. My mother never married and I swore that I wasn’t going to live like her. I’ve always lived my life on the straight and narrow. Jeff and I never drank. We didn’t do drugs. We were planning to give our child a good strong stable environment. That helicopter accident ruined my—our whole lives.”
“I can imagine.”
While Cameron waited for her to go on with what had brought her into the police station, the two women sat in silence.
Eventually, Tiffany picked up the grocery bag filled with the dead roses and held them out to the detective. “Someone is stalking me. I have this horrible feeling that he’s going to kill me and my baby.”
“Who’s stalking you?”
“I have no idea,” Tiffany said. “I don’t even know anyone here.”
“How did you end up here if you don’t know anyone?” Cameron asked.
“I thought it was a blessing,” Tiffany said. “A couple of weeks after Jeff got killed, I got this e-mail from a human resources lady at Epic Technologies. Somehow, they had gotten my resume and the company president, Stan Frost, was looking for an executive assistant. The salary and benefits were unbelievable. I told them that I was pregnant and they said it didn’t matter. He even offered six months maternity leave.”
“Even though you were already pregnant when they offered you the job?”
Tiffany nodded her head. “They paid my moving costs and found me a nice single family house in a great neighborhood. I thought it was all an answer to my prayers until these dead roses start showing up on my doorstep with these sick notes.”
Cameron peered inside the bag at the long stem dead roses. She counted eleven roses. “Is this all that you have received?”
“One has been on my welcome mat when I have come home from work every day. There’s a note tied to it with a black ribbon.”
“Every night?”
Tiffany nodded her head. “The notes are getting worse every day. I’m scared to go home.”
Cameron reached inside to take out the stack of plain white cards. She read the first note:
Roses are Dead,
Violets are Blue,
In Twelve Days, you will be dead, too.
“Slumming, Gates?” the trooper asked when he returned to his desk. An older, career patrolman with a buzz cut, he glared a warning for the detective to not be poaching his case.
“I was just giving the ATM Bandit a ride here in the back of my cruiser.” She handed Tiffany the rose with its card. “Ms. Ambrose looked like she could use some help.”
“Which is what I’m givi
ng her.” He handed Tiffany a report. “You can sign this complaint and we’ll make sure a patrol car keeps tabs in your neighborhood.”
Eying the report, Tiffany looked up to Cameron. “Is that all?”
“This sicko is making death threats,” the detective said.
“His latest note said three days.” Tiffany dug out the rose with the latest note attached to it in black ribbon. “In three days, he’s going to kill me and my baby.”
“Has he broken into your home?”
“Not yet.”
“No direct contact? You can’t even give me a name of who to question.”
“So after he attacks me and I ask him his name, then you’ll help me?” The tears on Tiffany’s face shone brightly against her red face.
“Right now,” the patrolman said, “all you have is vague threats.”
“I wouldn’t call a written count down a vague threat,” Cameron said.
His glare ordered the detective to stay out of the conversation. “It’s most likely some warped bored teenager who lives in your neighborhood getting his jollies by upsetting you.”
Sobbing, Tiffany Ambrose gathered up the roses in the grocery bag. “I told Mr. Frost that this would all be a big waste of time. I was right. I wish I was wrong. When it’s too good to be true, it usually is. I never should have left Norfolk.”
Sobbing, she ran out of the squad room and was gone.
Cameron tore her eyes from the door through which the desperate woman had run to the patrolman, who rolled his eyes as a comment. Women!
Men! Cameron thought in reply.
“What would you do, Gates?” the officer called after her when she got up to leave.
“My job,” she replied. “Find the guy and stop him.”
Countdown to murder. Is that really such a unique Modes Operand?
Her morning hours occupied with paperwork, Cameron’s mind kept straying back to Tiffany Ambrose and her tearful exit. While the trooper were right in some aspects, a nagging pang in the detective’s gut kept telling her that there was more to this case than a youthful prank to scare a pregnant widow.
While eating her tuna fish sandwich and bag of chips, Cameron took a couple of minutes to do a search of the crime database for similar MOs of stalkers or killers leaving a single dead rose daily for their intended victims leading up to the murder.
The search produced an extensive list.
Okay. Let’s narrow it down. She typed in the search for “A dead rose, plus a threat in the form of a poem.”
That reduced it some.
“A dead rose, plus a threat with D-day being on the thirteenth day.”
The list was reduced to one: Eddie Palmer. Suspected in two murders. Convicted in one.
Now that’s more like it. While munching on the chips, She read:
Victim One was his girlfriend, who was found murdered on the thirteenth day after receiving a dead rose daily for twelve days. She received threatening poems along with the roses. Police suspected but was unable to pin the murder on Palmer, who left their small Kansas town and enlisted in the Marines.
Five years later, his then pregnant girlfriend started receiving roses with threatening poems. Thirteen days later, she was found murdered. Stabbed to death like girlfriend Number One.
Cameron sat up in her seat. This has to be the guy! She continued to read.
Eddie Palmer was arrested and, since the victim was enlisted in the Marines, tried in military court for murder. Found guilty.
It can’t be. He must have gotten out and be up to his old tricks again.
Eddie Palmer died in prison eight years ago.
It can’t be. Our guy must be a copycat!
Cameron scanned the names in the case file for the investigator and those connected with the case. One of them had to be involved with Tiffany Ambrose, whose late husband was also in the military, to be terrorizing her.
She found a name that jumped out at her from the computer monitor.
Lead Prosecutor: Joshua Thornton, Judge Advocate General.
Also known as Cameron Gates’ husband. Well, at least I know where to find him.
“Hello, handsome,” Cameron purred into the phone when Joshua Thornton, Hancock County’s prosecuting attorney, across the state line from her jurisdiction, answered the phone.
“You’re late,” he said.
Wondering if she had forgotten about a lunch date with her husband, Cameron snatched her cell phone and checked the calendar. “Late for what?”
“Our lunch time bootie call.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “Usually, when we don’t meet for lunch, you call at noon and talk dirty to me. But it’s now almost one o’clock.” He uttered an exaggerated sigh. “I guess the honeymoon is over.”
“I was working,” she explained about her encounter with Tiffany Ambrose in the squad room. “I’d like, for once, to catch a killer before he hits the victim.”
Joshua’s tone turned serious. “How can I help?”
“Tell me about Eddie Palmer.”
There was silence from the other end of the line. “Why are you asking about him?” he finally asked. “He can’t be your guy. He’s dead.”
“Maybe he had a friend or fan who’s emulating him,” she suggested. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the similarities between Tiffany’s circumstance and Eddie Palmer’s murders.”
“Eddie Palmer killed women who he had impregnated,” Joshua said. “The father of Tiffany’s baby died in Afghanistan. The only similarity is the roses and threats in the form of poems. I don’t think that’s such an original MO. Look elsewhere.”
Cameron was grasping. “Can you at least check to see if anyone connected with Eddie Palmer or his case could be using his MO? Look to see if there’s a connection between anyone connected to him and Tiffany Ambrose. Even a cell mate from when he was in prison.”
“His cellmate killed him. He’s still in jail,” Joshua replied. “But I’ll check. Only because I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Cameron had no sooner hung up and the direct line on her phone rang. The caller ID read Stan Frost. Where do I know that name? Tiffany’s boss. The owner of Epic Technologies.
She answered the phone. “Detective Cameron Gates.”
“Detective Gates, are you the detective that talked to Tiffany Ambrose this morning when she went in to report her stalker?” For a rich man, Cameron noted an urgent tone is his voice. He didn’t sound as smooth talking as most rich folks she encountered in her job. “Stan Frost,” he replied. “Tiffany Ambrose is my … executive assistant.”
The detective’s ears perked up when she heard him pause before saying that she was his executive assistant. What were you going to say, Mr. Frost? She fought to keep from asking. Lover? But then, Cameron recalled that Tiffany was pregnant when she accepted the job hundreds of miles away and in another state, away from her family and friends. But then, some men love pregnant women.
“Tiffany just called me,” he said. “She had a doctor’s appointment and has been so upset. So she went home early and that sicko left her another rose and note. She had told me about how you tried to help, so I contacted the police department to track you down. Please. I’m a very wealthy man. I can pay you very well. Can you please help? Can you catch this guy?”
“What did the note say on the rose?”
“She didn’t read the whole poem to me,” he said. “She only read the highlight. Two more days before he kills her.”
Lieutenant Dugan, Cameron’s boss, was a by-the-book type. Their squad was homicide. Tiffany Ambrose was not dead. Therefore, her problem was not theirs. However, as Cameron had hoped, he saw no reason not to bend the rules in an effort to prevent a homicide instead of waiting for it to happen before taking on the case.
“How much comp time do you have?” Dugan asked the detective.
“You know that,” she replied.
“Take it,” he ordered. “Let’s be proactive for once.”
“I called the prison,” Joshua reported. “Palmer had no visitors, friends, or family. No correspondence outside the prison. Nothing. No warped fans. We kept our cases very close to the vest in JAG. Rarely would we let our cases make the news.”
“Maybe it is someone who was connected with the case,” Cameron said. “Jury—”
“It was a trial in a military court,” Joshua said. “We aren’t talking about common citizens who are taken off the streets. These people had years of military experience, plus psychological examinations. If any of them were psychopaths, it would have come out before they were put on a military panel.”
“So it’s just a coincidence that our proposed victim is pregnant. Her late husband was a Navy officer—”
“Palmer was an enlisted man in the Marines,” Joshua said. “Big difference.”
“Tiffany came from Norfolk, which is where Eddie Palmer’s second murder took place. Plus, the killer is using Eddie Palmer’s MO.” Cameron asked, “Do you really buy that there’s no connection, Josh?”
“Do you want me to come out there?” It sounded like a threat made by a parent nagged into submission by a strong-willed child.
“Yes,” she replied. “Meet me at Epic Technologies. Top floor. Stan Frost, president’s office.”
As hard as she tried, when she did, Cameron could not stop the smile that crossed her face when she saw “her silver fox”, Joshua Thornton, enter the lobby on the ground floor of Epic Technologies.
Even while making the transition from mid-to-late forties, Joshua Thornton was one of the most attractive men in the room with his head of silver hair that fell to touch the top of his trench coat’s collar. The transition from auburn hair to silver happened during his five children’s teenaged years. Now only one teenager was left at home.
“What’s your plan?” Joshua asked her after a quick hug and kiss in front of the elevators.
“Identify our suspects and see who has a connection to Eddie Palmer,” she replied. “We don’t have a lot of time left. The last note our killer left said Tiffany had only two days left.” She did not like the grimace that crossed his face. “What?”