Weapons of Mass Distraction

by Camilla Chafer

  “We’re trying to find out who robbed these places,” said Lily. “We don’t think it’s a coincidence four wedding stores were burglarized in such a short amount of time. Did you see anything suspicious on the day of the robbery, or maybe before?”

  “Now, you mention it, there was one very peculiar woman. She wanted to know all about the dresses, if we had any stock kept in the back. She asked if she could make an evening appointment and I said we shut at six on the dot every night. Always have, always will. Except Thursdays, which is seven, and then we open late on Friday, at ten a.m.”

  “Did she ask anything about prices?” I asked, sticking to my theory of it being high-end retail theft. “Or about the value of your stock?”

  “No, but she seemed to recognize the designers right off. Very knowledgeable. Could tell the designer just by looking at the dress. Asked for the Monique Lhuilliers and Vera Wangs, then to see the Caroline Castigliano collection, as well as the new Melissa Sweet gowns. Later on, I thought, maybe she’s opening a store here, and wanted to check out the competition. I didn’t really think of her again until now.”

  “Do you remember when she came in?”

  “Oh yes. It was about a week before the store was burglarized.”

  “When did that happen?” I asked, pulling out my notepad.

  “Thursday night.”

  Lily and I glanced at each other. “I don’t suppose you have cameras?”

  “Yes, I do, but they aren’t great. They record, but they’re more for deterrent purposes.”

  I didn’t like to point out they hadn’t deterred anyone. “Can I see the footage from the night of the burglary? And if you have any from the day that woman came in?”

  “Let me go check. Take a seat while you wait.”

  “This is interesting,” said Lily. “I smell a breakthrough.”

  Sally-Anne got us the tapes, having amazingly saved both of them, and she gave the discs to me. In turn, I gave her my business card. “If you can find out anything, I’d be very grateful,” said Sally-Anne. “My insurance hasn’t come through yet, and I used my savings to restock. I’d hate to think this could happen again. I hear of it happening. Thieves watching you until you restock, then taking all that too. Honestly, girls, it would ruin me.”

  “That’s why we’re going to bust these creeps,” said Lily, determination etched across her face. “Aren’t we, Lexi?”

  “I knew you could do it!” exclaimed Sally-Anne before I could give a less than optimistic answer, but who knew? The security footage might be everything we needed to present our case to MPD. “What wonderful young ladies you are! I can’t wait to speak to your mother!”

  “We are going to break this case,” said Lily as we climbed into her car again, my heart sinking at the idea of Sally-Anne telling my mother about the investigation. Not that it was a secret, or that my mother’s connection had gotten the lady talking, just the idea of disappointing one of her friend’s was extra pressure I didn’t need. “Look at all the breakthroughs we’ve had today. We’ve got a suspect and security tapes!”

  “We have a friend of my mom, and tapes we haven’t seen yet. We don’t know where the stolen dresses are, or if this mystery woman is part of it.”

  “Blah blah details,” said Lily. “Last store, then cocktails?”

  The last store on our list was situated in West Montgomery, which meant crawling through rush hour traffic and arriving just as the store was closing. By the looks of it, for good. It was empty.

  “Are you closing down?” Lily asked, looking forlorn as the middle-aged woman with a short brown bob turned the key in the door. A “Closed” sign bounced against the back of the glass. “I was looking for a dress.”

  “I’m afraid we are, so I can’t help you. I can’t keep the store open anymore,” she told us, one hand pausing on the glass pane as if she were saying goodbye to the building.

  “Because of the robbery?” I asked, getting right to the point.

  “Well, yes, I guess you heard. It was horrible.”

  “You could restock,” suggested Lily.

  “It’s not that. It’s knowing that someone was in here at night, stealing from me and my brides. The police said someone probably watched the store for a while before robbing it. They probably knew my routine. It gives me the creeps being here all alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lily and I both said.

  “Well, one door closes…” the woman trailed off. “Anyway, I’m sorry I can’t help you, but there’re some other really nice stores in Montgomery so I’m sure you’ll find a dress. Good luck.” She left before I could ask her more questions. That was one thing that bugged me about my job: asking people questions when they simply didn’t want to answer them. Sometimes, however, that was the only way to get the job done. It didn’t mean I liked it and on this occasion I was happy to let it slide. We gleaned plenty of information from our other visits. Now, it was just a case of deciding what was relevant.

  “Maybe they’re all in on it,” suggested Lily as we drove to her bar.

  “Who? What?” I asked, looking up from my doodled notes.

  “All the wedding store owners. Maybe they all got together and planned this.”

  “For what reason?”

  “To get rid of their stock, claim the insurance money. Maybe they’ll even restock the stores with the stolen dresses and double their money.”

  “That would be a good theory, if two of the stores hadn’t closed shop.”

  “They could have fenced them? Cindy said they sourced all the same dresses. Maybe they got the other two to sell their stock?

  “Maybe. Sharon seems too worried that she’ll get robbed next for her to be in on any crime ring. She wouldn’t have asked us to help if she were part of it.”

  “Maybe she’s not part of it. It could just be the other four,” Lily continued.

  “Okay. I guess we can do some background checks on the owners just to make sure that there’s nothing hinky in their past, like criminal records.”

  “Good call.”

  Two hours later, I called Solomon and asked him to collect me from Lily’s bar. We sat in a booth in the back and watched him look around. He paused by the door, waiting several minutes before he clocked us. He stared, making no effort to approach us, and just stared some more. Lily and I giggled. After another couple of minutes, he walked over.

  “What’s with the wigs and hats?” he asked. “Why is there a dog bone on the table?”

  This set us off into uncontrolled peals of giggles. “Don’t ask,” I hiccupped as the askew wig slid from my head and landed in an untidy red heap on the table.

  “Sunglasses?” said Lily, holding out a pair. They had diamante pieces sprinkled around the frames. Solomon shook his head, very seriously. “Not my style,” he said. Just then, Jord walked over, wearing a pair of pink sunglasses and a pink baseball cap. The lettering read, “Number 1 Mom.”

  “Hey,” he said to Solomon, clapping him on the shoulder before sliding into the booth next to Lily. “How’s it going?”

  “I really have no idea,” replied Solomon. If he were utterly perplexed, he didn’t show it. Somehow, that made it even funnier as Lily and I leaned into each other, giggling. “What’s with the "Mom" hat?”

  “I’m a proud man in charge of my sexuality,” Jord said, with a straight face. “I can wear a pink hat with ‘Mom’ on it if I want.”

  “Okay. I still want to know what’s going on with the dog bone.”

  Jord shrugged. “They won’t tell me. I figure it’s some kind of initiation thing.”

  I held up my hand to Solomon and he hoisted me up. “Please take me home?” I slurred. “I didn’t bring my car. I’m also drunk.”

  “Didn’t notice,” said Solomon, hooking an arm around my waist. He picked up a pair of sunglasses and slid them over my eyes. “You might need these in the morning. ‘Night guys. Never, ever tell me what the dog bone is for.”

  “One day you’ll beg to know
,” Lily yelled after us as I stumbled, giggling, out into the open air alongside Solomon.

  I didn’t remember getting home that night, but I did remember Solomon tucking me in, kissing me on the nose and quietly letting himself out. I couldn’t think about that though. It was all I could do to make the room stop spinning before I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  I was glad for the light relief the night before because the absolute last thing I wanted to do was probe into Lorena’s life more than I already had. To make it less sad, I reasoned that I was required to. She was my friend and someone hurt her. Someone ended her life and that wasn’t okay. Even worse, the killer may well have killed her friends, Jim and Karen. At the back of my mind was another horrifying thought: what if there was another person out there who didn’t know he or she was about to become a victim too? I had to find out what was going on and only wished I didn’t have to do it with a thumping head and a queasy stomach. Just how much did I drink the night before?

  I put it off as long as I could, starting on the background checks I agreed to make on the wedding store owners. Each report came back quickly, leaving me with nothing. Or more precisely, the whole load of nothing meant debunking the theory that the store owners were colluding in some sort of insurance fraud ring. None of the owners had criminal pasts to speak of, unless you counted one outstanding speeding ticket; and none of them came into a large amount of money recently. I emailed Lily, briefly summing up what I’d found, and asked her if she had a chance to look at Sally-Anne’s surveillance footage yet?

  Then I made a coffee, browsed the internet and finally, got myself into gear. I couldn’t put it off any longer and I couldn’t ask anyone else to do it for me. No, I had to swallow my discomfort and do my job like a pro. My preliminary search into Lorena turned up nothing of consequence, barring the photograph. I needed to see if there was more.

  After I ran through Lorena’s background paperwork again, sitting in the quiet, empty agency office, I still found nothing, but the obvious. Grocery bills. Two cell phones, which puzzled me until I worked out that one belonged to her daughter, now at college. One thing was clear, Lorena could afford day-to-day life on her part time job, but the college payments had to be stretching things financially. It seemed that attending the gym was her only recreational activity. I didn’t see anything in her financials to suggest that she ever went out to restaurants or bars, or that she had any hobbies, and from what I remembered, she never said anything to that effect either. That didn’t mean she didn’t go out. She could have had a boyfriend who paid, but I didn’t recall her mentioning one. All the same, Lorena was an attractive woman so I made a note to check into it. A lover could have killed her in a jealous rage, and she did say she wanted to talk to me about something important.

  Before I hit the streets — or in this case, the gym — in search of answers, I had a call to make.

  “How’s my favorite detective?” I said when Maddox answered his desk phone.

  “I don’t know. Who is it this week?”

  “Ha-ha. You, of course.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Maddox scoffed. I imagined him kicking back his chair and resting his feet on the decades-old desk he called home at the station. “What do you want to know?”

  “Two things. First off, did you get to speak to Karen Doyle after Jim Schwarz’s death?”

  "Why?"

  "I caught a case. Your case, my case. So..."

  “I should have guessed. Let me check my notes.” Maddox paused and I heard him open and shut a couple of drawers before the rustling of a few papers. “Found it. Hmm. Okay, I went looking for the woman who was sitting next to Jim, but couldn’t find her. To be honest, Lexi, I didn’t really try to find her. And yes, before you ask, I regret that now since she’s dead and her case is on my desk. I need to call the ME later but she looks like an allergic reaction from the initial reports.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, politely deciding not to rub it in that he missed an opportunity there. “Secondly, an update on Lorena Vasquez’s case would be great, please.”

  “You know I’m not supposed to divulge this information,” he said in a low voice.

  “Oh, please. Why are you lowering your voice? I can hear no one is in the squad room. Where’s everyone gone?”

  “Lunch.”

  “Kind of early.”

  “They like to be first. It’s burger day in the cafeteria.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  “I want to live.”

  “Good for you. Speaking of living…”

  “I know, I know. Dead woman.”

  “The dead woman was my friend.”

  There was a long pause. “I’m sorry, I forgot. What do you want to know? I’m gonna assume you have plenty of background on her already so I’ll share, then you share. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I agreed, wondering at his readiness to confer. Perhaps, he hadn’t turned up any worthwhile leads yet. “Whatever you’ve got.”

  “Cause of death was the stab wound. The ME says it would have been very quick as it punctured her heart.” I gasped at that and Maddox paused a moment before continuing. “She bled out within minutes and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, you could have done to save her, Lexi.”

  “Okay,” I said, my voice small and weak. “She was dead when I got there.”

  “I know. Even if she weren’t, there still would have been nothing you could have done. The knife went straight in and the killer pulled it up. The tearing of her aorta was extensive.”

  “Did you get a handle on the kind of knife used?” I groaned at my unintended pun. This was no joking matter and thankfully, Maddox let it slide.

  “Medium blade with slightly serrated edge. Common with kitchen knives. When we processed the scene, a kitchen knife was missing, so that fits. The wound was angled downwards so the killer is taller than the vic.”

  “So, the killer didn’t come armed?” I frowned at that. If the killer intended Lorena harm, why didn’t he or she bring a weapon?

  “Looks that way. Maybe the perp didn’t intend her harm to start with. It could have been an argument gone wrong and he or she grabbed the knife. Either way, the knife is missing. I don’t hold out any hopes of finding it, but I’ve had uniforms go through every trashcan in a five-block radius.”

  “What about anything linking Lorena to the killer?”

  “Nothing. No hairs, no fibers. Apart from a small mark on her forehead, Lorena didn’t have any defensive wounds and there was no skin under her nails, so we couldn’t extract any DNA. You know what that means?”

  I did and I sighed. “Lorena knew her killer and she wasn’t afraid of him or her.”

  “Enough to trust that person to enter her home,” Maddox agreed. “I found a single fingerprint on the doorframe but no hits when I ran it. This is my theory. Lorena knew her killer. He or she came to her house. Lorena let that person in, agreeing to talk. She had no reason at that stage to fear for her life. They go to the kitchen to get coffee or something and an argument gets heated. The suspect grabs the knife as the nearest weapon and stabs her, then flees.”

  “Maybe she opened the door, saw the killer and couldn’t get the door shut. She could have run into the kitchen. There’s another exit there,” I suggested.

  “Maybe. I thought of that, but a few things bother me about that scenario. First of all, her neighbors and friends say she’s security conscious, and she’s a woman alone in the house. She always keeps her doors locked. There’s a peephole. She looks through the peephole and sees someone she doesn’t trust, she doesn’t open the door, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed. “She thought someone had been in her house recently so she was careful. Really careful.”

  “So, I check the front door frame and the lock, and there’s no sign of it being forced. No scuffmarks on the door jamb to suggest someone prevented it closing, say with a foot. Lorena was confident and trusting enough to open the door, though maybe she w
as too confident. Plus, there’s no sign of struggle, not on her person or in the house.”

  “Could it have been a service person? A delivery?”

  “I checked into that too. There were no deliveries scheduled for her house that day and no services due. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone posing as a delivery person, or maybe she couldn't see the person clearly, so that’s still a question mark. This leads me back to the most obvious scenario…”

  “Lorena knew her killer and allowed him or her into her home.” I paused, remembering something Maddox said. “What about the mark on her forehead?”

  “You got it. Now I just have to work out who that person is. As for that mark, it’s got me stumped. It’s small and looks like two triangles. I have photos, but it’s not clear. So far, that mark is my top lead, which gives me very little to work from. Your turn. Tell me what you know about Lorena.”

  “Not much more than I told you already. She was worried about something and wanted to talk to me and that’s why I was at her house that morning.”

  “Were you close enough as friends for her to confide in you about personal things?”

  “No,” I decided. We never talked about anything in depth. We stuck to the usual mundane topics with an added dash of running, something Lorena was good at and I wanted to improve. “No. We were only just getting to know each other and really only talked about running and mundane conversations. ‘How are you?’, running, her daughter, that sort of thing.”

  “Do you think she approached you because of your professional capacity?”

  “It looks that way. She knew I’m a PI and she approached me after Jim Schwarz and Karen Doyle died. She knew both of them.”

  “From the gym?”

  “No, from before that. They all worked for the same firm, Simonstech, and they all left around the same time. I know Jim and Karen were both unhappy about something.”

  “Coincidence?” Maddox sounded surprised.

  “Do you believe in them?” I asked.

  “Not anymore, but occasionally, they happen. How come you brought up those two? Apart from their connection to Lorena.”