Murder by Serpents (Five Star First Edition Mystery)

by Graham, Barbara

  Nina was lifting another cookie to her lips when she stopped. “Did you just imply that Jane, our Jane, went on a date with Red?”

  Theo nodded. “You really shouldn't miss bowling night if you want to keep up with things. And put away those damned binoculars before you do turn in another Nellie Pearl.” Theo snatched a couple of cookies from the package. “Actually, the bowlers don't know about the date. I just told them she couldn't come.” She opened the cookie and licked the center. “Jane went to a play with Red and I haven't heard anything since.”

  “That's why he got home so late last night. He is usually home by five and he stays home a lot. Sometimes I see him walk over to the Tomlinsons. I think they play checkers or something.” Her eyes widened. “I am turning into Nellie Pearl, aren't I?”

  Theo nodded. “Red's a nice man and I'm glad to see Jane get out a bit.”

  “Yeah, ten years is long enough to wait before dating.” She chuckled. “Remember Old Man Ferguson? He started dating Olive Peters between the time his wife died and the funeral.”

  Theo frowned. “I think he wanted someone else to cook and clean for him. He probably couldn't put sugar in his own tea.”

  “That's the truth.” Nina closed the cookie package and lay back against the pillows. “I feel so isolated on this couch. Tell me what else is happening in town?”

  Theo told Nina the basics of the dead man in Ruby's parking lot. Not knowing either the man or the circumstances, they concentrated on the horrifying idea of being in a car with loose snakes.

  As if unable to bear the idea of the snakes, Nina changed the subject. “Did you know that Prudence is pregnant again? Who do you suppose is the father of this one?”

  For a change, Theo thought she did know, but she wasn't sure. She wouldn't speculate, not even to Nina, but Deputy Darren Holt had her vote.

  Prudence Sligar remained a community mystery. Born and raised in the hills around Silersville, she loved the area, and except for the time she attended beauty school, had always lived there. Her grandmother had been a seer, a wise woman, who lived life on her own terms. Maybe that had encouraged Prudence's own independence. Never married, Prudence had produced a brood of fatherless children. Local gossips had been thwarted at every turn. No one knew who any of the fathers might be. Just as she had defied them when she painted the exterior of her beauty shop, the Klip ’n’ Kurl, pink and purple, she felt no compunction to satisfy the curiosity of the citizens.

  “She is engaged to Darren. Maybe he knows, but he sure isn't the father of that brood.” She smiled. “Do you think even the children know? Do they visit their fathers? Does she get child support?”

  “Well if they do, they are ahead of my children right now.” Nina adjusted her position again. “That honey he met on the Internet is bound to be disappointed. I just know that he told her he has money and a fabulous body.” Her caustic grin suggested that he had neither.

  “Don't you assume they were both telling lies?” Theo snorted. “Not that I want one, but I could claim that I had a forty-inch bosom.”

  Nina laughed as she stared at her friend's flat chest. “Closer to an IQ of forty.”

  Theo tossed a pillow in Nina's face.

  Tony was puzzling over the information about the real, but dead, John Mize and his mysterious cousin when Wade burst through the doorway.

  He carried an extra large evidence envelope wrapped in both arms, held closely to his chest like the game winning football. The threshold of Tony's office was the goal line. A sudden smile pulled the skin taut over the high, sharp cheekbones his Cherokee grandmother had contributed, giving him a savage appearance. A hint of wolf glowed in his eyes.

  “You know those snake boxes that Stan thought were so odd? Well guess what?” Wade didn't wait for Tony to form a reply. “They have false bottoms. I found a wad of cash and a boatload of pills inside them.”

  “What kind of pills? Are they identifiable?” Tony guessed from Wade's expression that the answer would not make him happy. Drugs were the bane of law enforcement. The problem existed everywhere. No community was immune. Even worse, in his mind, was the ocean of problems that drugs compounded.

  “Oh, yeah.” Wade's smile grew even wider. “Our dead guy was hauling Hillbilly Heroin. Lot's of it. All twenties and forties. He had full jars of a hundred tablets and some of those little bubble packs stashed in the bottom of those boxes. If he needed that kind of medication, he had to suffer a lot of pain.” The expression on his face declared that he didn't believe pain had anything to do with the reason for such a large supply.

  “Hell and damnation!” Tony stared at the envelope. “That's all we need. Someone bringing bootleg OxyContin into our area. Let's hope he only transported it and hadn't started distributing it.” Tony smoothed his scalp, wishing he had hair so he could pull it out.

  It never failed to amaze him what people would willingly do to their bodies. They would take every prescription medication produced and see what else they could do with it. If they saw a new plant, they would try smoking it or chewing it or steeping it like tea. The things people would do to score drugs baffled him. They would steal, prostitute themselves, and even kill. Most of the crime he had seen as a Chicago cop related directly to someone wanting a fix of something. The night a junkie shot Tony in the stomach, he was off duty and the guy was too strung out to know the name of the planet.

  “We have a big enough drug problem around here already.” Unaware of his actions, he rubbed his stomach before he slipped a few antacids into his mouth. “I haven't heard anything about more drugs than usual, have you?”

  Wade shook his head. “Maybe he just suffered from a lot of pain and they were prescribed for him.” Even as he spoke, he didn't look as if he believed that story for a second. If prescribed, all of those pills would have been either in a prescription bottle or labeled with a doctor's name and instructions. “My uncle took them when he had cancer. He claimed OxyContin was a miracle drug and would have traded his car for them if he had to. I've heard that people have killed themselves when they haven't been able to get it.”

  “It is powerful stuff, all right, but I'll bet your uncle didn't get very many of them at a time and didn't keep them in a box with poisonous snakes. I also bet he took it the way the doctor prescribed it.” It confounded him how people could see what illegal drugs did to others and still try them. “I don't suppose the ones you found in the snake boxes were conveniently labeled with the name of a pharmacy or distributor?”

  “No, but we'll be able to track them by the serial numbers on the jars. They are factory packages. Did you know that they are delivered in an armored truck in some places?” Wade frowned as he passed the envelope to Tony. “There were only smudges of fingerprints on the jars. Nothing I would be able to identify with any accuracy.”

  “How much cash?” Tony inspected the notations Wade had made on the envelope before handing it back to him. “How many milligrams are we talking about here?” He knew that the going rate for illegally obtained OxyContin continued to rise.

  “I found fifty thousand in cash.” Wade checked his notes. “I make out twenty thousand milligrams in forties and four thousand in twenties in the jars. The bubble packs add another thousand or so milligrams, so a minimum value of thirty thousand.” He handed Tony a paper. “Here's a list of the serial numbers.”

  A low whistle passed through Tony's lips. “I guess I'd better put in a call to the district drug task force. I'm sure they will be delighted to hear about this. Nothing makes their day brighter than hearing about some new angle.” He paused, considering the conflicting information about their drug-running, prison-tattooed, snake-handling preacher.

  The facts didn't add up. The possibility existed, although it was slim, that the man had reformed in prison and had no idea what he carried in those boxes. On the other hand, Quentin had to be involved in this whole drug scenario, didn't he? But how? The man was simply not smart enough to engineer a plan to obtain that many prescription pil
ls. Tony thought of Quentin as more of the do-it-yourself, grow-your-own kind of degenerate. That thought triggered a memory of something he had seen up at Quentin's place.

  Wade stood in front of his desk, watching him. After a minute or so of silence and inaction on Tony's part, he cleared his throat. “Do you want me to call them? I need to lock this stuff in the evidence locker first, but then I could make the call.”

  “No. That's okay. I was just thinking.” Absently, he smoothed his bald scalp. “I'll give them the serial numbers, and I just thought of another question that I need to ask them.”

  Tony could hear Darren and Quentin in the hallway. “What I really need you to do is to get back to your fingerprint project. We need to get those prints out for identification. We know our body is in the system.” Tony's eyes returned to the photograph of the tattoos. “For the county to get its money's worth from all that expensive fingerprint training that you got from the FBI in Quantico, you need to get on it.”

  Nodding, Wade left the office and Tony buzzed Ruth Ann. “Tell Darren to put Quentin in the greenhouse. He can either wait inside with him or stand outside and guard the door, but he is not to leave. I want him to stay for the interview.”

  The crisp response from Ruth Ann informed him that Darren and Quentin had stopped into the interrogation room for a moment and then moved on to the drunk tank. Furthermore, she thought they should have gone there as soon as they entered the building and not bothered to pass near her desk. Quentin was obviously so high on whatever drug that he had been taking that it would be a long time before his orbit would bring him near the earth again.

  Tony's stomach rumbled. Popping three more antacids into his mouth, he dialed the number for the drug task force. He had no idea how long this conversation might last. He would probably have to talk to the DEA as well. He had to let them know about the OxyContin, but more urgently, at least in his mind, he had to find out if Quentin was cooking methamphetamine up at his place. If so, someone trained by the DEA would have to come and deal with that. Dismantling a meth lab was extremely dangerous and specialized work that his tiny county couldn't begin to handle.

  He doubted that Angelina would help with the process. He needed her out of Quentin's house. Maybe he could still catch Sheila and have her bring the woman back into town.

  He reached for the telephone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  No one had to tell Tony that Blossom Flowers had a crush on him.

  Theo once suggested that Blossom would love anyone who treated her like a real person and not like a slave. The beleaguered woman had lived at home for her entire thirty years, with all of the other Flowers issuing directives to her. Theo also said that Blossom worked as much for the freedom of being out of the house as she did for the money.

  Tony agreed. Being nice to her paid off on this day when Blossom arrived at the Law Enforcement Center carrying a whole pie, freshly baked, just for him.

  “What's the occasion, Blossom?” Tony had to step back so the large woman could squeeze through the doorway. Her scalp showed under the little flame-orange tufts of hair. He sympathized with her because, like him, she had almost no hair.

  His mouth started watering the instant that he spied the crumb-coated pie. The scents of warm apples and cinnamon teased his nose and his stomach growled in response.

  “I wanted to thank you.” Blossom started to set the pie on his desk but paused when she couldn't find a clear space on the whole surface.

  “For what?” Why was she thanking him? Relieved that it didn't appear to be a bribe, Tony set a stack of folders on the floor, making room for the pie. He really wanted a piece of that fabulous pie. A big piece of it. After she left, he would take it to the lunchroom and share the rest. Maybe.

  “For talking to Ruby.” Her protruding eyes filled with tears. “I really like that job and would hate to lose it.”

  “There was never any problem with your job, Blossom. Ruby's only concern was for your safety. You should give yourself more credit.” Tony almost groaned when he saw her lower herself into one of the steel and vinyl chairs that faced his desk. She seemed to be settling in for a visit. “Do you get along with the others down there?”

  “Oh, yeah, Miss Ruby is real nice to work for and Red always has a funny story to tell me. Even the waitresses are always saying that they get extra good tips from anyone who eats a bite of my pies or cakes.” A happy smile lifted the corners of her mouth, giving her plain face a pleasant glow.

  Tony had talked to Red on several occasions and he had seemed like a nice enough man. Now that he knew his mother had gone on a date with him, Tony's curiosity grew. What separated Red from the other eligible men in town? “Tell me about Red.”

  “Well, I guess his hair used to be red and that's how he got his name, but it looks all white to me.” At Tony's encouraging nod, she continued. “He's a foreigner, of course, and always sad, even when he's telling me a joke.”

  Tony knew that Blossom's family considered anyone whose grandparents hadn't been born in Park County to be a foreigner. Tony knew about being a foreigner. His family hadn't moved to Tennessee until he was eight and his classmates had treated him, for a time, like he had arrived from another planet. Theo, a direct descendant of Amoes Siler, was not a foreigner. “Why do you think that Red is always sad?”

  “It hasn't been too long since his wife died of the cancer, you know, and before that his daughter died. That's one of the reasons they moved up here, you know, getting away from the sadness.” She pawed around in her tote bag and finally located a box of Junior Mints. Pouring a mound onto her palm, she shoved the whole pile into her mouth. “He was retired, but now he's the morning cook. I don't quite know how you can be retired and still have to be at work, do you?”

  Tony didn't want to discuss the philosophy of retirement. “Do you know what business he was in before he retired?” Tony had to fight to keep his eyes away from the pie. The aroma pulled him like a magnet.

  Blossom shook her head, then stopped. “Wait.” A chocolate-flecked smile creased her face. “Yeah, he did say once that he was a bookkeeper or banker, something with letters.”

  “CPA?” In Tony's eyes, the worn little man with the droopy, bloodshot eyes looked like an accountant. Whenever Tony saw him, everything about him seemed very tidy and precise. Only the grease smears on his old-fashioned bifocal glasses eluded his penchant for cleanliness.

  “That's it.” Blossom cheered, half-rising from her seat.

  The way she lifted up made Tony think of a game show contestant with the winning answer. Maybe she practiced cheering with the television. If Wade hadn't poked his head into the office, Blossom might have stayed the rest of the afternoon.

  Until Tony saw Wade and Blossom side by side, in such close quarters, he hadn't really noticed before but the young deputy had the thickest black hair Tony had ever seen. He kept it cut close to the scalp, but instead of showing skin, it looked like a fur cap. It wasn't fair. Viewed next to Blossom's, her hair looked even sparser. As for himself, Tony could feel the movement of air on his scalp.

  “Hey there, Blossom.” Wade gave her a big smile. “I hate to interrupt but I need to talk to you, Sheriff.” He waved a sheet of paper.

  Blossom heaved herself to her feet and headed for the door. “When you finish the pie, just drop the pie plate at Ruby's. She knows I brought it over here.”

  “Thanks again, Blossom, for the pie. In the future though, I want you to remember that I was just doing my job. Ruby never intended to fire you.” Lifting the pie from the desk, Tony followed her through the doorway and waited until she reached the end of the hall. Beckoning with his head, he signaled his deputy. “Come with me, Wade. You can tell me what you've got and have a slice of pie at the same time. Your expression tells me that I am going to enjoy both things.”

  Wade passed him and walked backwards toward the lunchroom. “We've got a positive ID for the prints that were on that sardine can from the motel
cabin.” Wade's dark blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “That same guy left a few of his fingerprints on the car, and they are similar to some partials on the drug containers.”

  “Wonderful.” Tony pulled a couple of dinner plates from the cabinet and loaded them up with enormous slices of pie.

  Wade didn't waste any time. The moment that he settled on a chair, he shoveled a huge bite of pie into his mouth. A moan of pleasure accompanied the aroma of apples. “That's so good.”

  For a moment, work was forgotten as they both enjoyed the first pleasures of the dessert. “Okay, I can think now.” Tony grinned. “I thought I'd never get to taste it. Let's see who that fancy fingerprint education has turned up.”

  Tony pulled the paper from underneath Wade's elbow and began to read it out loud. “Peter ‘Sammy’ Samson.” He studied the photographs. Sammy did not look like a handsome man. “My, my, looking at the length of this, I'm can see that Sammy has not been a good boy. Let's see what he has been doing in other states.” As he read, he ate slowly, savoring each delicious morsel.