Dolled Up for Murder

by Jane K. Cleland

  “We don’t know,” I replied, pleased that my anxiety hadn’t affected my voice.

  “Ms. Abbott?” Ellis said. “I’m Chief Hunter.” He paused as the tall man reached us. “You are?”

  “Jim. Jim Abbott, Grace’s brother. We heard a news flash about the van being jacked. What’s going on?”

  The two men shook hands, assessing one another. I held my breath, waiting for Ellis’s answer.

  “We don’t know yet,” he said. “The vehicle Eric was driving was found here with some of the contents, antiques, destroyed. There’s no sign of Eric.”

  Grace took a step back, and her already white complexion lost what little color it had. She fumbled with her purse. “I’ll call him.”

  “His phone is in the van,” Ellis said.

  Her eyes widened. “Was it that man?”

  “What man?” Ellis asked.

  “The one who tried to get into the Farmington house.” She looked at me, then back to Ellis. “Eric called me when he was ready to leave and told me about it. It was right after the sisters left to go to the police station. This man rang the doorbell.”

  She stopped talking, and Ellis encouraged her to continue. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Eric was a little annoyed at all the interruptions, the man, and having to lock up the house, because it made him late and we had plans.” Rosy dots of color appeared on her cheeks, and she looked down for a moment. “Eric asked me to change our dinner reservation from seven to seven thirty. We were going out to celebrate my new job … I’ve been looking for so long … I just landed my dream job, teaching third grade.”

  “Oh, Grace—congratulations.” I said. “What an accomplishment.” To finish her degree and get her teaching license, Grace had attended night school for years while working full-time as a teacher’s aide.

  She smiled, small and wavering, but a smile nonetheless. “Thanks.” She turned back to Ellis. “Eric apologized for being late.”

  “Did he say what the man wanted?”

  “He told Eric he’d left something inside and would only be a sec.” She turned to talk to me. “You know how much Eric hates confrontation, and that’s what this felt like to him. Eric was a little upset. He said the guy tried to walk through him like he wasn’t there, and Eric had to strong-arm him a little to keep him out. That’s when the neighbor stopped by. Another interruption.”

  “What did the neighbor want?”

  “To drop off a casserole for the sisters. Eric put it in the fridge.”

  “All set,” the technician called from the back of the van. She hopped down and added, “I uploaded it, Chief, and e-mailed you the URL and password.”

  Ellis looked down at his BlackBerry, then up at me. “I’ll forward it to you.” He tapped something into his handheld, then asked, “How long do you think it will take you?”

  I mentally reviewed the steps I’d need to go through. “At least an hour, probably more.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  I nodded, then turned to Grace and her brother. Grace looked frightened and worried and sad all at once. Her brother just looked worried. “Will you be home later?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Or at my brother’s.”

  As I entered Jim’s phone number into my cell, just to have it, the police officer I thought was named Daryl had Wes back his car out of the way. I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I walked to my vehicle. Latching my seat belt, I felt my eyes fill and blinked the tears away. I wouldn’t tell anyone what I was thinking, not even Ellis, not even Ty, but I couldn’t stop the words from forming in my head. There was a chance, maybe a small one, maybe a big one, but there was a chance that Eric was dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Fred looked up as I walked into the main office, then leapt up, sending his chair skittering sideways. Something in my expression must have alerted him to trouble.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “Has everyone else left?”

  “Yes,” Fred said.

  I took a last look at Griff, sitting in his idling police car, guarding the marked-off crime scene area, then plunked down at Gretchen’s computer and took a deep breath. “Brace yourself—I have bad news.” I told him what little I knew. “So … here’s the deal … while the police do what they do, trying to find witnesses, looking at the forensics, and so on, they’ve asked us to help figure out what someone had against the antiques, and why they seemed to focus mostly on the dolls.

  “I’ll take the recording I made during my initial walk-through and print still shots of the dolls. We might need photos of each piece of glassware and every tool, but from what I saw, I don’t think we will. Most of those objects were still in the crates. It was the dolls that took the worst hit. You take the tech’s recording showing the debris in the van and print stills using a grid pattern to ensure we have every inch covered. When we tape them together, we’ll have one image of the entire van floor. We’ll each take half the doll photographs and use them to ID everything, all the doll body parts and accessories. That way we can see if anything is missing. Okay?”

  He nodded. “I’m game.”

  I turned on Gretchen’s computer, and while it booted up, I glanced at her Mickey Mouse clock. It was seven forty-five. It occurred to me that Penn Moreau’s bit aired just about now. I used the remote to turn on the flat-screen TV mounted on a side wall. An ad for a new hybrid car was just ending.

  I opened my e-mail program and forwarded Ellis’s e-mail to Fred, then went to the FTP site where we store client videos. When I had the Farmington video up and running, I fast-forwarded to the doll section. I muted my audio descriptions and began framing individual images of each doll, both front and back, and sent them one at a time to our high-end color printer/copier.

  “And now our Legal Eagle, Pennington Moreau, will discuss investor rights,” the TV anchor said.

  “Thanks, Mitch,” Penn said. “There’s never a good time to lose money, and everyone knows that investing carries risks, but losing money because an investment didn’t pan out as you’d hoped is a different animal altogether than losing money because of fraud.

  “A senior employee in the district attorney’s office told me that Alice Michaels, the owner of ADM Financial Advisers, was about to be indicted for fraud. The allegations state that she’d been running a Ponzi scheme for at least the last decade. As you may know, a Ponzi scheme is a scam that pays returns to investors, not from profits, dividends, or interest earned, but from the monies they themselves paid into the company or from the monies other investors paid into the company.

  “While individuals must take responsibility for their investment decisions, they can’t be held responsible if they don’t have the facts or if they were lied to. Sorting out who knew what and when and who told whom what and when is always complex. The situation got even more complicated today. Alice Michaels, who was a friend of mine, died. She was shot, murdered, in Prescott’s Antiques and Auctions’ parking lot. Alice had been at Prescott’s to buy antique dolls for her stellar collection. So what does all of this mean to you, if you’re one of the more than two hundred investors who lost money with ADM Financial Advisers?

  “In all probability, if Alice had been found guilty of fraud, the court would have frozen both the company’s assets and her personal assets. The judge would then appoint an administrator to vet investor claims and divvy up the proceeds in an attempt to make the victims whole, that is, to try to get people back to where they started.

  “Her death complicates the issue, but that’s all it does—complicate it. It doesn’t eliminate her obligation to repay her investors—if she did, in fact, commit fraud. So what should you do now? Make certain the district attorney’s office has your name and contact information. Call the number running along the bottom of the screen. You can bet they’ll be burning the midnight oil to sort out this thorny situation as expeditiously as possible.

  “I want to leave you with one la
st thought. The old saw that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, are words to live by. This is Pennington Moreau, the Legal Eagle, soaring high and signing off.”

  I clicked off the remote and finished printing the doll photos, then taped the front and back views so each doll was represented on one two-sided printout. I labeled each one with the doll’s number from my listing. I divided the photos into two piles, the dolls I had brought back with me and the dolls that Eric had been sent to pack up. The dolls we had on-site were:

  1. The Bébé Bru Jne Alice had held earlier in the day

  2. A Bébé Teteur (a Bru with a mechanism that allows the doll to suck liquid from a baby bottle)

  3. A Bébé Musique (a Bru with a mechanism that allows the doll to play music)

  4. A Bébé Gourmand (a Bru with a mechanism that allows the doll to be fed)

  5. The G.I. Joe prototype

  6. The kachina

  7. A Long-Faced Triste Bébé, made by Belton & Jumeau

  8. A nineteenth-century European doll with a bisque head and leather body wearing a plaid jumper over a white eyelet blouse

  9. A Dutch doll with a cloth torso and wooden legs wearing clogs

  10. A Japanese kokeshi doll

  11. A set of nineteenth-century Russian nesting dolls, painted with an Oriental motif

  The dolls Eric had been sent to pack up were:

  1. An Effanbee doll depicting George Washington, paired with #2

  2. An Effanbee doll depicting Martha Washington, paired with #1

  3. An early European papier-mâché doll, wearing a white cotton dress and red felt boots

  4. A Barrois French fashion doll

  5. A leather-bodied doll with a papier-mâché head

  6. A Conta & Boehme parian doll

  7. An early Kestner doll

  8. A midcentury Kestner doll

  9. A K*R Simon & Halbig doll

  10. A German-made Armand Marseille doll, dressed after a Renoir portrait

  11. A Heinrich Handwerck Simon & Halbig doll

  12. A Belton shoulder head doll by Bahr & Proschild

  “How are you doing?” I asked Fred as I tapped the sheets on the desk to square up the edges.

  “It’s a little tricky taping it together—the images overlap.”

  I nodded. “Let me help.”

  Fred had laid out the printouts on the floor and was piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Once we got in the rhythm of matching known elements, accounting for the overlaps was easy, and the process moved quickly. Fifteen minutes after we started, we had produced a life-sized image of the van floor. I handed Fred shots one through six of the dolls Eric had been sent to pack up. I took the remaining photos myself.

  My cell phone rang, and I grabbed it, silently intoning a quick prayer that it was Eric, that he’d broken free and was somewhere safe needing a ride. It wasn’t. It was Zoë, my friend, landlady, and neighbor.

  “Oh, God, Zoë,” I said. “I completely forgot about dinner. We have a situation here. I can’t explain now.”

  “I heard about Alice and Eric on the news. You must be flipping out. Are you okay?”

  “More or less. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Sure—just know I’m here if you need me.”

  “Thanks, Zoë.”

  I hung up and noticed two texts, both from Wes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came pounding on the door.

  I looked at the taped-together image of the van floor. I leaned back, resting on the heels of my hands and crossing my legs Indian-style.

  “I’m thinking we should use Post-it flags to indicate which doll part is from which doll,” I said. “We shouldn’t write on the photo itself until we’re certain we’re right. So many of the dolls are similar in style, material, and color, identifying which body part comes from which doll isn’t going to be easy. Even identifying the wigs and clothes is going to be tough. Look at this brunette wig, for example.” I pointed to a fan-shaped straight bit of long dark brown hair partially hidden under the passenger’s seat, then spread my collection of photos out as if I were melding a hand in a card game. “If you look at these dolls, you can see that three of the six have similar hair.” I shrugged. “Oh, well. All we can do is the best we can.”

  Fred and I worked methodically, side by side. We crawled around the van photo to get as close to each image as possible. The process was tedious but not complicated and, to my relief, went much more quickly than I’d feared. Within half an hour, I’d eliminated all of my six dolls. Fred was almost done with his allotment as well.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to a bisque head. “The eyes are glass, glued on. They haven’t been ripped off or destroyed.” I raised my eyes to meet his gaze. “Which means whatever is going on, the attacker isn’t looking for jewels. If he were, he’d have removed all the eyes to check if they’re sapphires or emeralds.”

  “Good point,” Fred said. He stretched out his legs. “Now what?” he asked. “Everything is accounted for.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone destroy the dolls?”

  “Beats me,” Fred said, shaking his head.

  I stared at the van floor image. Strips of pink and yellow Post-it flags crisscrossed over the debris. “So since it’s clear this wasn’t about stealing for profit, what was it about?”

  “Anger. Destruction. Someone was completely pissed off at the dolls’ former owner and took it out on the collection.”

  “Maybe,” I said, trying to reason it through.

  If this was some kind of payback or commentary on the Farmington family, wouldn’t it be more satisfying to break the glassware, to hear the shattering? If someone had set out to destroy something, maybe the dolls, why wouldn’t he simply have broken into the Farmington house and trashed them on the spot? Maybe he tried. Maybe the kidnapper was the same man Eric told Grace had tried to get into the house. Why not break in when the place was empty? Because the Farmingtons have an excellent security system. Why kidnap Eric? Because Eric saw him hijacking the van and could identify him. The scenario seemed obvious, but it didn’t answer the key question—why would someone destroy only the dolls?

  I stood up. “Sasha put the eleven dolls we have here in the safe, right?”

  “Yup, in a bin.”

  “I’ll go get them—maybe we can figure out what’s going on if we have them in our hands.”

  “I’ll do a video of the van floor so we’ll have it on record if the police want the original.”

  “Good thinking,” I said and pushed open the heavy door that led into the warehouse. I headed down the central aisle. The lighting was dim. Shelves of inventory stood on either side, casting long, spider-shaped shadows along the walkways. Midway down, I glanced to the left. Hank was in his basket. I wondered if he was still asleep or back asleep. I recalled an article I’d read years earlier stating that cats need roughly three times as much sleep as people. Observing Hank, I could believe it.

  At the end of the aisle, I turned left toward the walk-in safe. Two steps before I reached it, I heard a soft rumbling and stopped short. I glanced at Hank, but he hadn’t budged. The soft, steady, low sound was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. A lawn mower? No. Some construction equipment? No. The loading dock garage-style door being raised? Yes.

  I ran along the back wall to the access door, my boots clomping on the concrete floor. By the time I got there, the rumbling had stopped. I peered out the tempered glass miniwindow. The loading dock door was closed. I pressed my eyes against the glass and looked in every direction. No one was visible. I checked the bolts. The door was secure. Even if someone succeeded in accessing the loading dock, there was no way they could get into the warehouse. Still, it was creepy. I shrugged and shook my head, wondering if I could have imagined the sound. I hadn’t.

  “Oh, my God!” I said aloud.

  I ran full speed to the front, wrenched open the office door, and dashed outside. Griff was sitting in his idling patrol car. He s
aw me charging at him, jumped out of his car, and ran to meet me.

  “Someone was trying to break in through the loading dock door,” I said. “They stopped, but they can’t have gotten far. You should look for them. Now.”

  “How could they have opened the door?” Griff asked.

  “Using a remote. Eric would have had it with him in the van.”

  Griff nodded and ran back to his car, grabbed his radio, and said something. He turned off the car and pocketed the key, then said, “Get inside and lock the door. Stay there.”

  I nodded and ran. Fred was standing by the window.

  “I didn’t know whether to stay here or follow you out,” he said.

  “You did the right thing.” I locked the door and set the perimeter alarm as I told him about the mystery sound. “Someone opened the loading dock door using Eric’s remote. I bet that when it was up about three feet he peeked in and saw that we have security cameras aimed at the opening. So he lowered the door and left the same way he came onto the property, probably through the woods.”

  “That’s crazy—who’d try to break in with police all over the place?”

  “A risk taker,” I said. “We need to get a look at the cameras.” I called our security company. The monitor on duty was a man named Vince. “There are two cameras on the loading dock platform, mounted in the top rear corners facing the loading dock door,” I said. I described what I wanted, and he asked me to hold on.

  “Will there be enough light?” Fred asked while I was on hold.

  “Yes. When the door lifts, spotlights come on so there’s enough light for us—and for the cameras—to work.”

  “I found what you’re looking for,” Vince said when he was back on the line. “Each camera takes a shot every three seconds. Whoever lifted the door aimed a flashlight inside, a big one, like a torch. The beam is so bright you can’t make out anything about the person holding it. You’ll see what I mean. I was on break then, but I looked up the notes. The guy on duty wrote that the door lowered twenty seconds after it began to lift and there was no intrusion.”