Sweets, Suspects, and Women Sleuths Cozy Mystery Set

by Meredith Potts

  While I was deep in a Christmas light haze, Daniel was determined to get my focus, not just because it would distract me from the lights, but because he didn’t want his compliment to go unnoticed.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  Daniel turned my head and gazed into my eyes.

  His hazel eyes were so deep that they provide ample distraction. As I peered into them, my focus shifted completely to him. In addition to his deep eyes, Daniel was a tall, handsome, athletic man in his early forties with short, sandy-brown hair, and soft, kissable lips. Oh, how delicious those lips were. If I wasn’t enamored enough with my boyfriend, he seemed determined to make me even more smitten.

  Daniel continued. “Every day I am amazed by how beautiful you are.”

  I blushed, just as I had the first time he told me that. He had said it a number of times in the subsequent months since then, but it wasn’t something that ever got old.

  “A woman never gets tired of hearing that,” I said.

  “I’m not just saying it,” Daniel replied. “It’s the truth.”

  After hearing that, I couldn’t help but lean in and give him a kiss.

  “You’re such a sweet guy,” I said.

  “What can I say? I love you,” he replied.

  “I love you, too.”

  “Now, don’t worry so much about the lights,” Daniel said.

  “That’s easy for you to say. They haven’t been the thorn in your side for the last fifteen minutes.”

  “Want me to give them a try?”

  I was happy to give him the box of lights. “Be my guest.”

  He grabbed the box from me. “What are you wasting your time with these lights for, anyway? Why not just pay George Dolan to do light display?”

  I knew he was trying to lighten the mood with a joke, but I was still too on edge to really cut loose. George was the neighborhood lighting fanatic, a man who believed that no light display could ever be too gaudy. Every year, he tried to top himself, seeing if he could burn out an entire electric grid in the process. His lights got him plenty of press. They also bothered a number of people on the street, notably his next-door neighbor.

  I sent a zinger my boyfriend’s way. “Because I don’t want my Christmas lights to be so bright that people can see them from space.”

  Daniel laughed. “True. George does go a little overboard.”

  I scoffed. “A little? The man’s electric bill is probably a thousand dollars a month.”

  “Well, at least he has the anger of his neighbors to show for his efforts,” Daniel deadpanned.

  I snickered. “Yeah.”

  “Come on, Hope. Don’t you want the neighborhood to look at you with contempt, too?” he joked.

  I shook my head. “I’ll stick with the few strings of lights that I have here.”

  “If I can find a way to untangle them, that is,” Daniel replied.

  Suddenly, I heard a police siren outside. My attention was immediately diverted. The sound of the siren became louder as it drew closer to my house.

  “What’s that about?” I asked.

  Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  As I looked out my window, a police car bolted past my place. It was quickly followed by a second squad car.

  My eyes opened wide. “Two police cars on my street at the same time? That never happens.”

  Daniel joined me at the window. “We should check it out.”

  Chapter Two

  My boyfriend and I went outside to investigate what was going on. We barely made it to the driveway of my house when we saw the two police cars stop at none other than George Dolan’s house. How eerie? Especially since we had just been talking about him.

  I had a naturally curious mind, so I couldn’t help but wonder what the police were doing there. My first instinct was that they had gotten a complaint from one of my neighbors about how bright his lights were.

  As I looked at George’s light display, gaudy didn’t quite capture how ridiculously over the top it was. There were more lights in his front yard than I had ever seen before in my life. It was almost like looking at a caricature of what a light display should be. Every inch of his two-story Spanish house was covered. He must have cleaned out an entire lighting aisle at the local big box store.

  As I stared at the colored lights flashing off and on, I could feel a headache coming on. I could see someone having a seizure from looking too long at the display. It was one thing to get into the spirit of the season. It was another to turn the holidays into a mockery of good taste.

  Any thought that the police presence was due to a neighbor’s complaint was soon dashed when I saw my brother, Joe Hadley, getting out of the driver’s seat of one of the squad cars.

  Uh-oh.

  This was bad news. Joe was a homicide detective. He didn’t handle simple police matters like lighting complaints. Had it been just a slow day at the precinct, or had a murder occurred?

  My heart sank as I watched my brother approach George’s front door. “Talk about bad news. Joe is there.”

  Knowing how nosy I was, my boyfriend invited me to indulge my curiosity. “You should go check it out.”

  Daniel didn’t have to ask me twice.

  I dashed over to George’s house and got wrapped up in how surreal the scene was. It was the kind of spectacle a person didn’t forget. The combination of police lights and Christmas lights melded into a strange visual stew in my head.

  I caught up with Joe, who was talking to one of his deputies. My brother was a clean-shaven, crew-cut, blue-eyed man in his late thirties with no neck to speak of. That evening, Joe also happened to have a look on his face like George’s house was the last place he wanted to be right then, as if he had gotten this call on his radio exactly when he was about to bite into a donut.

  “Joe, what’s going on?” I asked.

  Before my brother had the chance to answer, a second deputy, Brock Weatherford, signaled for my brother’s attention from the side of the house. “Detective, you’re going to want to see this,” Brock said.

  Joe and I followed the deputy to the back of the house, where my worst suspicions were confirmed. A grisly sight awaited us on my neighbor’s back patio. My eyes widened as I stared at George’s dead body on the ground in front of me. If that wasn’t a hard enough thing to look at that, there was also no mistaking how he had died. A strand of Christmas lights was wrapped around George’s neck, leaving no doubt that he had been strangled to death.

  Chapter Three

  I felt as though I was going to throw up. The sight of dead bodies always did that to me. Despite all the homicide cases that I had investigated in the past, I was still as uncomfortable as ever around murder victims. I couldn’t get over what an awful way it was to die, being strangled by Christmas lights. Not that there was an ideal way to die, but this one was neither quick nor painless.

  My brother didn’t have quite the visceral reaction to seeing the body that I did. Instead, he became quiet for a moment, no doubt to process the grim news. Once he had composed himself, he switched back into detective mode, knowing he had a new investigation on his hands.

  Soon after, Joe was joined at the scene by the coroner and a forensics team. The coroner and his crew began gathering as much evidence as they could.

  Joe stepped aside to let the forensics team do their job and vented his frustrations with me. “Can you believe this?” Joe asked.

  I was still in shock. “No. This is crazy. Who kills someone at the holidays?”

  He replied very matter-of-factly, “Murder doesn’t take a vacation.”

  “In my head, I know that. But in my heart…” I sighed and then finished my sentence. “It’s the holidays. Christmas is in a week. To be confronted with a murder case this time of year, it’s just crazy.”

  Joe shook his head. “What can I say? It’s a crazy world we live in.”

  I nodded. “Unfortunately, the world seems to be getting crazier every day.”

 
“Don’t remind me.”

  As my brother and I were working through our emotions, the coroner requested Joe’s attention.

  “Detective,” Todd Kelty said.

  Todd was a fifty-two-year-old oval-faced man with thinning hair, a growing waistline, and an insatiable yen for fast food. That evening’s junk-food vice was a double cheeseburger with a side of onion rings. I had smelled the onion on his breath when he first arrived.

  “Are you ready for us?” Joe asked.

  Todd nodded.

  We approached the body once again as Todd prepared to give us a rundown. I tried not to look at George’s corpse, but his ugly red reindeer Christmas sweater was hard to ignore, especially since it fit so tightly against his heavyset body.

  “What have you got, Todd?” my brother asked.

  “Deceased male, early fifties,” Todd replied.

  “Is it safe to assume that strangulation was the cause of death?” Joe asked.

  Todd nodded. “That’s what did it, all right.”

  Joe glanced at the patio, where there were a number of strands of lights still waiting to be strung up. After George’s murder, they wouldn’t be joining the rest of the lighting display, but they did bring up an interesting question in my brother’s mind.

  “With all the strands of lights scattered around here, do you think the killer brought their own lights from home, or did they just grab a strand from the pile here when they arrived on the scene?” Joe asked.

  Todd bit the corner of his lip. “It’s too hard to tell.”

  My brother’s suspicions didn’t end there. “It’s pretty curious that the killer left the strand of lights around the victim’s neck. Have you been able to pull any prints?”

  Todd shook his head. “The killer must have worn gloves. We haven’t found any fingerprints whatsoever.”

  Joe groaned. “Of course not. Do you have an estimated time of death?”

  “Judging by the condition of the body, it’s looking like he was killed sometime in the last hour.”

  “Have your team found any evidence yet?”

  Todd shook his head again. “Nothing to speak of.”

  My brother tried his best not to get discouraged. “Do you have anything for us to work with?”

  “Not yet, but it’s still early.”

  Joe realized that he was getting nowhere and gave up questioning Todd. “All right. Well, get back to me if you find anything.”

  Todd nodded. “Will do.”

  The coroner then went back to examining the body.

  For Joe and me, things were just heating up. Our next step was talking with Florence Griffin, George’s neighbor.

  Chapter Four

  Florence lived next door to George. The seventy-eight-year-old had long, curly black hair, thick glasses, and a penchant for floral-print dresses. In her pre-retirement days, she had been a receptionist at a personal injury law firm. By the way she talked about herself, you’d think she had been an attorney. It was one thing to take pride in your work—it was another to take credit where it didn’t belong. More than a few times, I had caught her boasting as if she had personally won large settlements for a number of the firm’s clients.

  In her current state as a retiree, she had quickly turned into the neighborhood gossip. She loved putting herself in the middle of other people’s business. Normally, that annoyed me to no end, especially when she fixed her prying eyes on me. Little did I realize her nosiness might actually come in handy.

  Joe and I talked with her in the living room of her ranch-style brown house.

  “Hope, I can’t believe this happened,” Florence said.

  Florence was more distraught than I had ever seen her. I didn’t blame her. My nerves were frayed, too. Just as I thought I would never see another dead body in my life, a new one turned up. For Florence, this was the first murder investigation she had even been in the thick of.

  While the primary goal for my brother and me was to get any useful information we could get out of Florence, that wouldn’t happen if we weren’t able to bring her back from the brink. Her hands trembled as though she was on the verge of a panic attack.

  I extended my sympathies to her. “I know it’s hard to believe. It is truly terrible what happened. I’m so sorry things ended this way for George.”

  Florence’s eyes were bulging. She kept shaking her head in disbelief. “It just doesn’t make a lick of sense. We live on a safe street. How could a murder have occurred here? What has this world come to?”

  “I wish I could tell you that I had a good answer for you, but I don’t. This doesn’t make any sense to me, either. All I know is that my brother and I aren’t going to stop until we find out who did this,” I replied. I gazed into her eyes with the most sympathetic expression I could muster, hoping that my reassurance would calm her down, even slightly.

  Florence gave me a weak smile, but there was little conviction behind it.

  At that point, my brother stepped in. He had let me take the lead, hoping my soft-glove approach would work. As Florence looked just as flustered as ever, Joe took the gloves off and went to work the subtlety of a battering ram.

  “Ms. Griffin, we have to ask you some questions,” Joe said.

  At first, Florence was taken aback by my brother’s abruptness, then she surprisingly snapped to attention. “Oh, okay. What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “What made you decide to call the police?” Joe replied.

  “I heard yelling coming from George’s back yard.”

  “When you say yelling, was George the one doing the yelling?”

  Florence nodded. “Yes. I believe so.”

  “What was he yelling?”

  “First, he said, ‘No.’ Then, I heard him yell, ‘Stop.’”

  “Did you hear him yell anything else?” Joe asked.

  Florence shook her head. “No. After the yelling stopped, I heard some groaning. That was quickly followed by the sound of him gasping.”

  “Was George’s voice the only one you heard or did you hear anyone else?”

  “I’m pretty sure I only heard George.”

  My brother moved on to another line of questioning. “Did you see anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Wait. Why not?”

  “To start, when I first heard George yell, I didn’t have my glasses on. As I reached for them, I accidentally knocked them off my bedside table. By the time I reached over and grabbed the glasses then rushed to the window, George was the only person who was still in his back yard.”

  What a discouraging answer.

  Even so, my brother didn’t give up hope of gleaning more information from her. “So you didn’t see anything then that could help us identify his killer?”

  Florence shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Did you hear anything coming from the front of the house, like maybe a car peeling out of the driveway?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear a car at all.”

  “How odd,” I replied.

  “I don’t know that odd is the correct word. It was absolutely horrifying. I mean, I actually heard George’s dying gasps as he was being murdered. Then, as I looked out the window, I saw his body there on his patio,” Florence said.

  “Again, I’m so sorry that you saw that,” I replied.

  “So am I,” Florence said. “I just wish that I had seen who did this to him. If only I hadn’t knocked my glasses off my nightstand—”

  I tried comforting her. “You did your best.”

  Unfortunately, Florence’s best didn’t get us very far. Talking to her had provided us with no leads. That left us right back where we started.

  We talked to a few of the other neighbors but had no luck. None of them had any additional insights for us. It was highly discouraging, but that was the reality we were faced with.

  To me, the only useful piece of information that I got out of all our interviews was that no one had heard a car pull out of Geo
rge’s driveway. Obviously, the killer had taken a number of steps to remain as quiet as possible. In addition, with the light display being so bright in George’s front yard, to avoid being spotted, the killer most likely had parked on the street behind George’s house and had snuck through the neighbor’s yard on foot before killing George on his back patio.

  Given that new theory, Joe and I headed over to Cardinal Drive, which ran parallel to my street. Unfortunately, after questioning the neighbors on Cardinal Drive, we were unable to turn up any leads from them, either.

  Staring down that latest round of bad news, we realized that all the easy avenues had led us to dead ends. Suddenly, we were back to solving this case the long way. That meant formulating a list of suspects was in order.

  Chapter Five

  “Who would want to kill George Dolan?” Joe asked.

  I didn’t have to think for very long before a name came to my mind. “Maybe Carl Kincaid,” I replied.

  “Right. The other resident Christmas light fanatic in Hollywood.”

  I nodded. “The key word there being ‘fanatic.’ Carl and George were fierce rivals, always trying to one-up each other with bigger and better light displays. What if their rivalry turned deadly?”

  “It’s a possibility. Carl already had a crazy obsession with Christmas lights. Maybe his fanaticism didn’t stop at just lights. What if he went completely stark-raving mad?” Joe replied.

  “It’s a theory that deserves investigating.”

  “Did George have any other enemies that you can think of?” Joe asked.

  Another name instantly sprang to my mind. “You should probably pay David Donohue a visit.”

  “Of course. Your cranky neighbor,” Joe replied.

  “Yeah. Every year he complains about George’s lights, that they’re too bright, that they’re a nuisance, that George should be forced to take them down—”

  “Oh, I know. His reputation precedes him. He practically has police dispatch on speed dial. If it’s not Christmas lights he’s complaining about, it’s Halloween displays or that the marching band at the high school is practicing too loud.”