Murder on the Toy Town Express

by Barbara Early

  That woman was smart. Make the reader curious.

  While they continued the interview, going over release date, price, and other details, I stood up to stretch. At least I hoped that’s what it looked like. With Tippi stuck in the interview, she wouldn’t have time to hide anything incriminating that might be in the open. There were several computers in the room, and I began looking for any that could’ve once been Craig’s. He’d had those stickers plastered to the case. They’d be easy to identify if she’d taken the computer and left them on. And still probably easy if she’d tried to remove them. We’d gotten some items in with those same stickers, and they were a bear to remove. The top would come off, leaving a gummy mess behind unless you soaked them for three days, which you could not do with a computer.

  Most of the computers in the room were older models, and I’d eliminated all but one in the corner. All I could see of the last one was the cords sticking out of the back. It was, however, right in front of their restroom.

  “Excuse me,” I said rather loudly to Maxine, but more for Tippi’s benefit. “I need to use the restroom.”

  It’s hard to look casual when you’re walking, especially when you’re trying to look casual. I expect I half-sauntered and half-sashayed to the restroom. I cast a quick glance at the computer on the way and didn’t see any stickers or residue, but the angle wasn’t great. Coming out, however, would be perfect.

  The dingy unisex bathroom wasn’t hiding any clues either, unless it was that Buffalo Chips didn’t actually have a cleaning service. After a minute or so of standing in the middle of the room trying not to touch anything, I flushed the toilet with my shoe and then washed my hands, because even that limited contact gave me the willies.

  Then I had an idea. I pulled out my phone, pulled up the camera app, and had it at the ready. With any luck, I’d just look like one of any number of people who can’t take their eyes off their phone long enough to accomplish other business. I opened the door, took a quick picture, and then realized I’d forgotten to mute my phone. The sound of the camera click echoed through the office.

  “What are you doing?” Tippi asked.

  “Sorry. Accident.” I got so nervous, I dropped my cell phone.

  Tippi rolled her eyes. “Next time, if you want a picture of me, just ask. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  I picked up my phone, which had landed on the floor right next to the computer. The model was similar to the one I remembered in Craig’s shop, but there was no sticker debris in sight. Maxine might be able to identify it, though.

  I shoved my phone in my purse and sashayed-sauntered to my seat just as Tippi’s interview ended with a handshake.

  “I’ll e-mail you when the article goes live,” he said.

  When the reporter had climbed into his car and driven away, Tippi turned to me, her expression considerably less pleasant. “What was all that about?”

  “Just came back to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.

  “And take my picture?” she said. “I normally charge for that kind of thing. And don’t think you can post it anywhere or sell it. That’d be a violation of trademark and publicity. I still enjoy some celebrity status, you know.”

  “I wasn’t taking your picture.”

  “Let me see it then.”

  I pulled out my cell and showed her the most recent pictures. I watched her face as she saw the picture of the computer. She thumbed back through a few more pictures, but they were all toys and a couple of Othello.

  “Now who’s invading privacy?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just a bit touchy. Obviously you took that picture by mistake, unless you like photographs of archaic computers.”

  “I was curious why so many,” I said. “You’re the only one I’ve ever seen in the office.”

  “They came with the business,” she said. “I keep thinking that maybe I’ll be able to hire people to sit at those desks. Maybe with those comics . . .” She abruptly caught herself and extended her hand to Maxine. “Hello, I’m Tippi Hillman. Have we . . .”

  “We’ve met,” Maxine said, shaking Tippi’s hand. “At the toy and train show. I worked for Craig. So his comics are worth something, huh?”

  Tippi bobbed her head. “Be a lot better if I could get my hands on more of them.” She stopped and alternated her gaze between Maxine and me. “Do you two know the family? He had a kid, right?”

  “We’ve met,” I said.

  “Think they’d deal for the rest of Craig’s comics? Could be some good money in it for them if presales on the first keep up.”

  I sucked air through my teeth. Extra cash might make things a lot easier for Amanda and Kohl. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “Craig’s shop was broken into.”

  “So?”

  “Someone took his computer,” Maxine said. “The one he’d stored all his comics on.”

  “No backups?”

  I shook my head. “The police haven’t been able to find any. His house was broken into as well.”

  Tippi’s eyes grew wide as her face froze. “So some penny-ante thief is out there walking around with a potential fortune in comics and may not even know it?”

  Maxine paled. “I knew Craig could draw, but . . .”

  “It’s not just the drawing,” Tippi said. “It’s the hype going right now. And such a concept. And it feeds right into a lot of popular campaigns. Normal body types and not sexualizing children.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you seen them?” She flipped open one of the advanced copies. I scooted forward to look. All of his characters, male and female, adults and kids, were proportioned like young boys.

  “I’ve seen anime a little like this,” I said. “Chibi?” But even in Japanese manga, the females were identifiable, even though not as exaggerated as in many American comics. But Craig had taken sexuality completely out of the equation. I’d also figured out why Craig was so interested in youth sports and had taken so many pictures. He’d used the action shots from the games as models for his youthful superheroes in action.

  “We’ll call it something different,” Tippi said. “He’s empowered children. And I think that’s going to reach his audience. Not sure if it’s a gimmick or a trend. But as long as people pay to read, I’ll take either.” Tippi paused to study Maxine. “Of course, the original investors should get a cut. I imagine the lawyers will have to get involved too.”

  “Original investors?” I asked, wondering why Tippi seemed to be addressing Maxine.

  “Craig’s original deposit came in checks made out to cash.” Tippi put an hand on Maxine’s arm. “You are one of the investors, right?”

  Maxine swallowed hard. “I may have loaned him a little money. To get him started.”

  “Tippi,” I said, “do you have a list of these investors?”

  Chapter 25

  Maxine was silent on the way home. She stared morosely into the twilight, and I regretted asking her to come along. It was going to take time to get over losing a son, even one she didn’t know very well.

  But the closer we got back to town, the more unease I felt. “You never mentioned that you invested in Craig’s new comic series.” I stared down at the list of Craig’s investors—all women. Coincidence? One other was from the region, but a few more had addresses around the country.

  “No, I suppose I didn’t,” she said.

  “Do you know who these other women are?”

  “I can’t say. I’ve never met any of them.”

  We’d driven another block before I realized that Maxine hadn’t really answered my question.

  “But you know how Craig knew them.” It was a guess.

  She sniffled but didn’t answer, keeping her eyes on the road.

  “Maxine?”

  “Look, Liz, from what I know, Craig found most of his . . . investors . . . online. Now let me drive so we don’t end up in another pie stand.”

  It was meant to end the conver
sation, but it just made my brain start spinning. The slight pause before “investors.” If these women weren’t investors, why did they give Craig money?

  Also niggling in the back of my brain was the fact that someone had stolen Craig’s computer and wiped the shop’s laptop. Or tried to anyway. Was it to hide the record of these . . . online investors?

  “Maxine, did you wipe the laptop?”

  “What?” she mumbled.

  Another nonanswer.

  If Maxine had wiped the laptop, had she also taken the computer to suppress some kind of information on it? And if she’d taken that, might she have also broken into his home too?

  “Maxine, who are those other women?”

  She drew a breath through clenched teeth. “For someone who considered himself so smart, Craig could be an idiot.” She kept on driving, pausing to flip on the headlights. “They’re all . . . we’re all . . . women he bilked. At least I got that much from the laptop before . . .”

  “Before you wiped it. I get that. You’re his mother. It’s not hard to understand that you’d want to protect him.”

  Maxine snorted.

  Okay, not to protect him. “To protect them?” I glanced up at Maxine. The occasional oncoming headlights reflected across streams of tears running down her face. She reached to wipe some of it away.

  “Pull over,” I suggested. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re this upset.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not stopping this car until I figure out what to do.”

  If I’d suspected before, now I knew. Maxine’s involvement went far beyond wiping the laptop.

  “I can help you do that,” I said. “I can help you figure this out. Why don’t you talk to me?”

  While she was considering that, I put a finger around the handle of my purse that I’d set on the floor by my feet and started inching it up. If I could get to my cell phone inside . . .

  But as soon as I’d maneuvered the purse into my lap, Maxine grabbed it. I tugged back, and we struggled over the bag, the car swerving into oncoming traffic that warned her with loud horns. She managed to regain her lane while tossing my purse into the back seat.

  I lunged for it.

  “If you do that again, I will crash this car. Sit down!”

  I eased down into my seat. Except for the context, the words could’ve been said by any harried mother in the country. Only hers were not a warning but a threat.

  I struggled to keep my voice calm. “Maxine, I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “You know enough to be a problem.”

  “Just that you wiped the laptop. And you probably also took the computer.”

  She sniffed again. “It was all right there in front of me the whole time. The multiple accounts. The fake names. He kept all the e-mails.”

  “The evidence that proved he defrauded his investors?”

  If she’d snorted before, she cackled at this.

  “Defrauded. That’s a kind word. Want to know what he did?”

  “Yes. Please tell me.” I’d decided my best bet was to try to calm her down and keep her talking. I think that’s what Dad said to do when negotiating a hostage situation, which my alarmed brain just realized this was becoming. I hoped the same tactics still worked when you were the hostage.

  “I found Craig on a message board designed to reunite adopted kids with their birth parents. Well, it turns out, he’d registered for it under seven different e-mail addresses.”

  “Why would he . . . ?”

  “Because he’d surf the stories of mothers looking for sons his age.”

  “And pretend to be those sons?”

  “Basically, yes. He was a little smart about it, in that he wouldn’t answer their posts. He’d just copy those details and make his own post in the section for sons looking for their mothers. Then he’d wait for them to come to him, like a spider luring flies into his web.”

  “So you might not even be his mother.” Although I somehow doubted it. The resemblance was still striking.

  She shrugged. “No idea. He didn’t use a fake name to set up the account I found. That’s how I traced him here.”

  “Aren’t names and contact information on those sites private?”

  “You young people. Just because I have a little age on me, doesn’t mean I can’t still hack a computer. You could say I have over thirty years of experience. Not only did I find those e-mails, but spreadsheets he used to keep all the details about these aliases. And others he used to track his . . . income. Some women just wanted to help him. Others didn’t want it known that they’d had a son, so he blackmailed them for even more. It’s where he got the money to open the shop.”

  “So you discovered all this on the laptop and then wiped it.” I struggled to come up with a reason. “Because if police found it, it would give you a motive?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “But I know you didn’t stage the break-in at the comic shop,” I continued. “Those two mob guys already confessed to that. Besides, you wouldn’t have had to break in. You had a key.”

  “And if I’d used my key, everybody would have known I took the computer. I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured investigators would check it out eventually. But then the security service called me about the alarm.”

  “It didn’t go to the police?”

  She shook her head. “Craig had disconnected the part that called the police directly. We’d had too many false alarms, and the company threatened to start charging us. They normally called Craig, and he went to check things out. Since Craig obviously wasn’t answering, I guess I was next on the list. When I went over there, the door was jimmied and the place was a mess. I figured if I took the computer, the police would just blame whoever broke in.” She blew out a breath. “I shoved it in this little shed off the alley. We never used it for anything but rock salt and our snow shovels. Nobody ever thought to check there.”

  “But you also broke into Craig’s house?”

  “If he was stupid enough to leave evidence all over his computer . . .”

  “What did you find?”

  “Dirty laundry. A messy bathroom. Dishes in the sink. Typical guy place. Oh, why? Why did he have to be so secretive?”

  “Maxine. All those things. The computer. The break-in. They’re minor. The big thing is the murder. And I know you didn’t kill Craig. You were with me.”

  Tears continued to stream down her face as she forged ahead, her driving growing increasingly erratic.

  How could she have killed Craig? We’d arrived at his room at the same time. Unless . . .

  “You didn’t want to ride together because you wanted to get there before me. Did you even go home to feed your cat?”

  “This was before I hacked his laptop. When I still thought we might have . . . some kind of relationship. The fall threw me, you know? Like it was a reminder that I might not have forever to get around to telling him I was his mother.

  “So I went a little early. I called the hospital and got his room number. Just in case you were already waiting in the lobby, I went in the back way by the cafeteria. He was chatty and talkative when I got there, just propped up in the bed.”

  “So you told him you were his mother?”

  “I started to. But you know how I beat around the bush. I had just gotten to the topic of mothers, and he began yammering. He told me all about how he’d bilked all these stupid women. He was bragging. You don’t want to know the words he used or the names he called them. It’s like he had no filter at all.”

  “That was the drug,” I said. “It acts like a truth serum.”

  “So he really meant what he said.” A hitch in her voice had softened the last part. “I had to know for sure. ‘What about your real mother?’ I asked him.

  “He laughed. ‘Why would I want a mother?’ he said. ‘What’s she going to do, bake me cookies?’ Then he just swore and said he wished I was dead. Or wished his mother was dead. I never
got to tell him.”

  “But he was alive when you left.”

  “I didn’t leave. I just sat in the chair, dumbfounded.” She bit her lower lip and negotiated the car through a last-minute turn, screeching the tires. “I don’t know if it was what the hospital gave him, or if that drug was still in his system, but in five minutes, he was sleeping.

  “He looked so peaceful. So much like he did when he was a baby. I knew then it was time to finish what I should have done in the first place.”

  “Should have done? Maxine, you tried to kill him before?”

  “A few weeks after he was born. He was a mistake, you know. His father wasn’t in the picture, and my parents pretty much showed me the door. He was doomed from the very beginning. What kind of life did I have to offer him? He wouldn’t stop crying and I had no sleep. I’d held a pillow over him then too, until he was still. When I lifted the pillow, he looked so peaceful. Only then I chickened out.” She shook her head. “They took him away from me. Oh, I got counseling. They blamed it on chemicals in my brain, you see. Postpartum depression. But it turns out I was right. Not only Craig, but a lot of people would have been better off if I finished the job.”

  We were coming up on a police car parked on the side of the road. We had to be going over the speed limit, and I waved frantically as we passed. The same young officer who had been following me the day I crashed into the pie vendor at the flea market was sitting behind the wheel. He’d recognized the car. And he . . . waved back.

  “He knows what side his bread is buttered on.” Maxine snorted. “He’s not going to pull over his boss’s girlfriend.”

  Not unless I could get his attention. I lunged for the steering wheel just as she was making a turn.

  We struggled for control, the car jerking to the left and then to the right, even as Maxine pushed down on the accelerator and the car gained speed.

  As we hit the curb, my head struck the roof, and every bone in my body jolted. The car went airborne and started to spin. Next thing I knew, glass and splinters flew everywhere. The car came to a sudden stop, and the air bags pushed me back even as momentum threw me forward against my seat belt. Water poured in. Before I could figure out where the water was coming from, I knew we were stopped. I reached for the door handle, but it didn’t budge.